Flaubert's Parrot Page 6
‘Solitude enflamed the imagination of Henri K—, and gradually the parrot began to take on a rare significance in his mind. For him it became a kind of holy bird: he would handle it with deep respect, and spend hours in rapt contemplation of it. Then the parrot, returning its master’s gaze with an unflinching eye, would murmur the cabbalistic word, and Henri’s soul would be filled with the memory of his lost happiness. This strange life lasted several years. One day, however, people noticed that Henri K— was looking gloomier than usual; and there was a strange, wild light in his eye. The parrot had died.
‘Henri K— continued to live alone, now completely so. He had no link with the outside world. He became more and more wrapped up in himself. Sometimes he would not leave his room for days on end. He would eat whatever food was brought him, but took no notice of anyone. Gradually he began to believe that he himself had turned into a parrot. As if in imitation of the dead bird, he would squawk out the name he loved to hear; he would try walking like a parrot, perching on things, and extending his arms as if he had wings to beat.
‘Sometimes, he would lose his temper and start breaking the furniture; and his family decided to send him to the maison de santé at Gheel. On the journey there, however, he escaped during the night. The next morning they found him perched in a tree. Persuading him to come down proved very difficult, until someone had the idea of placing at the foot of his tree an enormous parrot-cage. On seeing this, the unfortunate monomaniac climbed down and was recaptured. He is now in the maison de santé at Gheel.’
We know that Flaubert was struck by this newspaper story. After the line, ‘gradually the parrot began to take on a rare significance in his mind’, he made the following annotation: ‘Change the animal: make it a dog instead of a parrot.’ Some brief plan for a future work, no doubt. But when, finally, the story of Loulou and Félicité came to be written, it was the parrot which stayed in place, and the owner who was changed.
Before Un cœur simple, parrots flit briefly through Flaubert’s work, and through his letters. Explaining to Louise the pull of foreign lands (December 11th, 1846), Gustave writes: ‘When we are children, we all want to live in the country of parrots and candied dates.’ Comforting a sad and discouraged Louise (March 27th, 1853), he reminds her that we are all caged birds, and that life weighs the heaviest on those with the largest wings: ‘We are all to a greater or lesser degree eagles or canaries, parrots or vultures.’ Denying to Louise that he is vain (December 9th, 1852), he distinguishes between Pride and Vanity: ‘Pride is a wild beast which lives in caves and roams the desert; Vanity, on the other hand, is a parrot which hops from branch to branch and chatters away in full view.’ Describing to Louise the heroic quest for style that Madame Bovary represents (April 19th, 1852), he explains: ‘How many times have I fallen flat on my face, just when I thought I had it within my grasp. Still, I feel that I mustn’t die without making sure that the style I can hear inside my head comes roaring out and drowns the cries of parrots and cicadas.’
In Salammbô, as I have already mentioned, the Carthaginian translators have parrots tattooed on their chests (a detail perhaps more apt than authentic?); in the same novel, some of the Barbarians have ‘sunshades in their hands or parrots on their shoulders’; while the furnishings of Salammbô’s terrace include a small ivory bed whose cushions are stuffed with parrot feathers – ‘for this was a prophetic bird, consecrated to the gods’.
There are no parrots in Madame Bovary or Bouvard et Pécuchet; no entry for PERROQUET in the Dictionnaire des idées reçues; and only a couple of brief mentions in La Tentation de saint Antoine. In Saint Julien l’hospitalier few animal species avoid slaughter during Julien’s first hunt – roosting grouse have their legs cut off, and low-flying cranes are snapped out of the sky by the huntsman’s whip – but the parrot remains unmentioned and unharmed. In the second hunt, however, when Julien’s ability to kill evaporates, when the animals become elusive, threatening observers of their stumbling pursuer, the parrot makes an appearance. Flashes of light in the forest, which Julien assumed to be stars low in the sky, prove to be the eyes of watching beasts: wild cats, squirrels, owls, parrots and monkeys.
And let’s not forget the parrot that wasn’t there. In L’Education sentimentale Frédéric wanders through an area of Paris wrecked by the 1848 uprising. He walks past barricades which have been torn down; he sees black pools that must be blood; houses have their blinds hanging like rags from a single nail. Here and there amid the chaos, delicate things have survived by chance. Frédéric peers in at a window. He sees a clock, some prints – and a parrot’s perch.
It isn’t so different, the way we wander through the past. Lost, disordered, fearful, we follow what signs there remain; we read the street names, but cannot be confident where we are. All around is wreckage. These people never stopped fighting. Then we see a house; a writer’s house, perhaps. There is a plaque on the front wall. ‘Gustave Flaubert, French writer, 1821–1880, lived here while —’ but then the letters shrink impossibly, as if on some optician’s chart. We walk closer. We look in at a window. Yes, it’s true; despite the carnage some delicate things have survived. A clock still ticks. Prints on the wall remind us that art was once appreciated here. A parrot’s perch catches the eye. We look for the parrot. Where is the parrot? We still hear its voice; but all we can see is a bare wooden perch. The bird has flown.
DOGS
1 The Dog Romantic. This was a large Newfoundland, the property of Elisa Schlesinger. If we believe Du Camp, he was called Nero; if we believe Goncourt, he was called Thabor. Gustave met Mme Schlesinger at Trouville: he was fourteen and a half, she twenty-six. She was beautiful, her husband was rich; she wore an immense straw hat, and her well-modelled shoulders could be glimpsed through her muslin dress. Nero, or Thabor, went everywhere with her. Gustave often followed at a discreet distance. Once, on the dunes, she opened her dress and suckled her baby. He was lost, helpless, tortured, fallen. Ever afterwards he would maintain that the brief summer of 1836 had cauterised his heart. (We are at liberty, of course, to disbelieve him. What did the Goncourts say? ‘Though perfectly frank by nature, he is never wholly sincere in what he says he feels and suffers and loves.’) And whom did he first tell of this passion? His schoolfriends? His mother? Mme Schlesinger herself? No: he told Nero (or Thabor). He would take the Newfoundland for walks across the Trouville sands, and in the soft secrecy of a dune he would drop down on his knees and wrap his arms around the dog. Then he would kiss it where he knew its mistress’s lips had been not long before (the location of the kiss remains a matter of debate: some say on the muzzle, some say on the top of the head); he would whisper in the shaggy ear of Nero (or Thabor) the secrets he longed to whisper in the ear that lay between the muslin dress and the straw hat; and he would burst into tears.
The memory of Mme Schlesinger, and her presence too, pursued Flaubert for the rest of his life. What happened to the dog is not recorded.
2 The Dog Practical. Not sufficient study, to my mind, has been made of the pets which were kept at Croisset. They flicker into brief existence, sometimes with a name attached, sometimes not; we rarely know when or how they were acquired, and when or how they died. Let us assemble them:
In 1840 Gustave’s sister Caroline has a goat called Souvit.
In 1840 the family has a black Newfoundland bitch called Néo (perhaps this name influenced Du Camp’s memory of Mme Schlesinger’s Newfoundland).
In 1853 Gustave dines alone at Croisset with an unnamed dog.
In 1854 Gustave dines with a dog named Dakno; probably the same animal as above.
In 1856–7 his niece Caroline has a pet rabbit.
In 1856 he exhibits on his lawn a stuffed crocodile he has brought back from the East: enabling it to bask in the sun again for the first time in 3,000 years.
In 1858 a wild rabbit takes up residence in the garden; Gustave forbids its slaughter.
In 1866 Gustave dines alone with a bowl of goldfish.
In 1867 the pet dog (no name, no breed) is killed by poison which has been laid down for rats.
In 1872 Gustave acquires Julio, a greyhound.
Note: If we are to complete the list of known domestic creatures to which Gustave played host, we must record that in October 1842 he suffered an infestation of crab-lice.
Of the pets listed above, the only one about which we have proper information is Julio. In April 1872 Mme Flaubert died; Gustave was left alone in the big house, having meals at a large table ‘tête-à-tête with myself’. In September his friend Edmond Laporte offered him a greyhound. Flaubert hesitated, being frightened of rabies, but eventually accepted it. He named the dog Julio (in honour of Juliet Herbert? – if you wish) and quickly grew fond of it. By the end of the month he was writing to his niece that his sole distraction (thirty-six years after casting his arms round Mme Schlesinger’s Newfoundland) was to embrace his ‘pauvre chien’. ‘His calm and his beauty make one jealous.’
The greyhound became his final companion at Croisset. An unlikely couple: the stout, sedentary novelist and the sleek racing dog. Julio’s own private life began to feature in Flaubert’s correspondence: he announced that the dog had become ‘morganatically united’ with ‘a young person’ of the neighbourhood. Owner and pet even got ill together: in the spring of 1879 Flaubert had rheumatism and a swollen foot, while Julio had an unspecified canine disease. ‘He is exactly like a person,’ Gustave wrote. ‘He makes little gestures that are profoundly human.’ Both of them recovered, and staggered on through the year. The winter of 1879–80 was exceptionally cold. Flaubert’s housekeeper made Julio a coat out of an old pair of trousers. They got through the winter together. Flaubert died in the spring.
What happened to the dog is not recorded.
3 The Dog Figurative. Madame Bovary has a dog, given to her by a game-keeper whose chest infection has been cured by her husband. It is une petite levrette d’Italie: a small Italian greyhound bitch. Nabokov, who is exceedingly peremptory with all translators of Flaubert, renders this as whippet. Whether he is zoologically correct or not, he certainly loses the sex of the animal, which seems to me important. This dog is given a passing significance as … less than a symbol, not exactly a metaphor; call it a figure. Emma acquires the greyhound while she and Charles are still living at Tostes: the time of early, inchoate stirrings of dissatisfaction within her; the time of boredom and discontent, but not yet of corruption. She takes her greyhound for walks, and the animal becomes, tactfully, briefly, for half a paragraph or so, something more than just a dog. ‘At first her thoughts would wander aimlessly, like her greyhound, which ran in circles, yapping after yellow butterflies, chasing field-mice and nibbling at poppies on the edge of a cornfield. Then, gradually, her ideas would come together until, sitting on a stretch of grass and stabbing at it with the end of her parasol, she would repeat to herself, “Oh God, why did I get married?”’
That is the first appearance of the dog, a delicate insertion; afterwards, Emma holds its head and kisses it (as Gustave had done to Nero/Thabor): the dog has a melancholy expression, and she talks to it as if to someone in need of consolation. She is talking, in other words (and in both senses), to herself. The dog’s second appearance is also its last. Charles and Emma move from Tostes to Yonville – a journey which marks Emma’s shift from dreams and fantasies to reality and corruption. Note also the traveller who shares the coach with them: the ironically named Monsieur Lheureux, the fancy-goods dealer and part-time usurer who finally ensnares Emma (financial corruption marks her fall as much as sexual corruption). On the journey, Emma’s greyhound escapes. They spend a good quarter of an hour whistling for it, and then give up. M. Lheureux plies Emma with a foretaste of false comfort: he tells her consoling stories of lost dogs which have returned to their masters despite great distances; why, there was even one that made it all the way back to Paris from Constantinople. Emma’s reaction to these stories is not recorded.
What happened to the dog is also not recorded.
4 The Dog Drowned and the Dog Fantastical. In January 1851 Flaubert and Du Camp were in Greece. They visited Marathón, Eleusis and Salamís. They met General Morandi, a soldier of fortune who had fought at Missolonghi, and who indignantly denied to them the calumny put about by the British aristocracy that Byron had deteriorated morally while in Greece: ‘He was magnificent,’ the General told them. ‘He looked like Achilles.’ Du Camp records how they visited Thermopylae and re-read their Plutarch on the battlefield. On January 12th they were heading towards Eleuthera – the two friends, a dragoman, and an armed policeman they employed as a guard – when the weather worsened. Rain fell heavily; the plain they were crossing became inundated; the policeman’s Scotch terrier was suddenly carried away and drowned in a swollen torrent. The rain turned to snow, and darkness closed in. Clouds shut out the stars; their solitude was complete.
An hour passed, then another; snow gathered thickly in the folds of their clothes; they missed their road. The policeman fired some pistol shots in the air, but there was no answer. Saturated, and very cold, they faced the prospect of a night in the saddle amid inhospitable terrain. The policeman was grieving for his Scotch terrier, while the dragoman – a fellow with big, prominent eyes like a lobster’s – had proved singularly incompetent throughout the trip; even his cooking had been a failure. They were riding cautiously, straining their eyes for a distant light, when the policeman shouted, ‘Halt!’ A dog was barking somewhere in the far distance. It was then that the dragoman displayed his sole talent: the ability to bark like a dog. He began to do so with a desperate vigour. When he stopped, they listened, and heard answering barks. The dragoman howled again. Slowly they advanced, stopping every so often to bark and be barked back at, then reorienting themselves. After half an hour of marching towards the ever-loudening village dog, they eventually found shelter for the night.
What happened to the dragoman is not recorded.
Note: Is it fair to add that Gustave’s journal offers a different version of the story? He agrees about the weather; he agrees about the date; he agrees that the dragoman couldn’t cook (a constant offering of lamb and hard-boiled eggs drove him to lunch on dry bread). Strangely, though, he doesn’t mention reading Plutarch on the battlefield. The policeman’s dog (breed unidentified in Flaubert’s version) wasn’t carried away by a torrent; it just drowned in deep water. As for the barking dragoman, Gustave merely records that when they heard the village dog in the distance, he ordered the policeman to fire his pistol in the air. The dog barked its reply; the policeman fired again; and by this more ordinary means they progressed towards shelter.
What happened to the truth is not recorded.
5
Snap!
In the more bookish areas of English middle-class society, whenever a coincidence occurs there is usually someone at hand to comment, ‘It’s just like Anthony Powell.’ Often the coincidence turns out, on the shortest examination, to be unremarkable: typically, it might consist of two acquaintances from school or university running into one another after a gap of several years. But the name of Powell is invoked to give legitimacy to the event; it’s rather like getting the priest to bless your car.
I don’t much care for coincidences. There’s something spooky about them: you sense momentarily what it must be like to live in an ordered, God-run universe, with Himself looking over your shoulder and helpfully dropping coarse hints about a cosmic plan. I prefer to feel that things are chaotic, free-wheeling, permanently as well as temporarily crazy – to feel the certainty of human ignorance, brutality and folly. ‘Whatever else happens,’ Flaubert wrote when the Franco-Prussian war broke out, ‘we shall remain stupid.’ Mere boastful pessimism? Or a necessary razing of expectation before anything can be properly thought, or done, or written?
I don’t even care for harmless, comic coincidences. I once went out to dinner and discovered that the seven other people present had all just finished reading A Dance to the Music of Time. I didn’t rel
ish this: not least because it meant that I didn’t break my silence until the cheese course.
And as for coincidences in books – there’s something cheap and sentimental about the device; it can’t help always seeming aesthetically gimcrack. That troubadour who passes by just in time to rescue the girl from a hedgerow scuffle; the sudden but convenient Dickensian benefactors; the neat shipwreck on a foreign shore which reunites siblings and lovers. I once disparaged this lazy stratagem to a poet I met, a man presumably skilled in the coincidences of rhyme. ‘Perhaps,’ he replied with a genial loftiness, ‘you have too prosaic a mind?’
‘But surely,’ I came back, rather pleased with myself, ‘a prosaic mind is the best judge of prose?’
I’d ban coincidences, if I were a dictator of fiction. Well, perhaps not entirely. Coincidences would be permitted in the picaresque; that’s where they belong. Go on, take them: let the pilot whose parachute has failed to open land in the haystack, let the virtuous pauper with the gangrenous foot discover the buried treasure – it’s all right, it doesn’t really matter …
One way of legitimising coincidences, of course, is to call them ironies. That’s what smart people do. Irony is, after all, the modern mode, a drinking companion for resonance and wit. Who could be against it? And yet sometimes I wonder if the wittiest, most resonant irony isn’t just a well-brushed, well-educated coincidence.
I don’t know what Flaubert thought about coincidence. I had hoped for some characteristic entry in his unflaggingly ironic Dictionnaire des idées reçues; but it jumps pointedly from cognac to coitus. Still, his love of irony is plain; it’s one of the most modern things about him. In Egypt he was delighted to discover that almeh, the word for ‘bluestocking’, had gradually lost this original meaning and come to signify ‘whore’.