No More Learning

From that youthful day when he
read to his friend Maxime Du Camp his great unpublished novel
'Novembre,' to the eve of his death, when he traced the last lines of
'Bouvard and Pécuchet,' he developed without pause or modification
one changeless system and expressed one changeless conclusion con-
cerning human life. One metaphysical conviction lightens the pages
of his youth and those of his approaching age, as the same sun irradi-
ates morning and evening of the same day with universal light. This
doctrine, born with Flaubert, as I shall try to show, is the old doc-
trine of pessimism, but of a verified, studied-out, hopeless pessimism,
as atomically established as that of Schopenhauer in Germany and of
old Heraclitus in Greece. From the point of view of the novelist, as
from that of the two philosophers, the evil of life does not arise from
circumstances, but is inherent in the very fact of humanity. Whether
barbarian or civilized, whether belonging to the antique world or to
modern society, to an age of faith or to an epoch of skepticism,
whether artist or artisan, simple or complex, the human being lives
to see the failure of his ambition, be it noble or base, narrow or
boundless. The mocking hand of Fate seems to have written a nega-
tive sign before the colossal sum of human efforts, and the total
always shows a loss; the greatness of these efforts augmenting the
greatness of the predetermined ruin. Such is the idea permeating
from end to end all the books composed by this admirable artist, the
thesis he struggled to demonstrate by examples not far-fetched and
abstract, but concrete and living, and of such extraordinary intensity
that the series of six volumes really constitutes the most absolute,
the most uncompromising manual of nihilism ever composed.
To comprehend the doctrine back of the accident and the theory
behind the fact, one must consider the chief characters of these books
successively. By a process quite opposed to that of authors who are
simply misanthropic, Flaubert does not make the final miseries of
his characters result from their faults, but from their qualities. At
the same time he is careful to select ordinary and not exceptional
types, and to surround them with ordinary circumstances.
Thus con-
stituted, they cease to be individual and become representative, and
their symbolic failure becomes the failure of their whole class. Take
as examples Madame Bovary in the novel of that name, and Frédé-
ric Moreau in 'L'Éducation Sentimentale. ' Both are results of the
legitimate and indeed very noble effort which pushes the lower
classes toward culture and refinement. Emma Bovary is the daugh-
ter of a farmer who wished her to become a "lady," and Frédéric is


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GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
5817
He
the son of a middle-class father who has resolved that his boy shall
have a "liberal" profession. She has been sent to a convent.
has been put in school. In their class of society this is the accepted
educational process, ninety-nine times out of a hundred. Both pupils
respond to the instruction they receive. Ah, well! if the first de-
scends, step by step, the ladder which leads to vice, to crime, to
suicide, it is simply because, played upon by the religious and poeti-
cal emotions of the convent which was so long her home, she has
formed too exquisite, too complex, too sequestered a dream of exist-
ence, and has felt too acutely the meagreness of her environment.
She is perverted by the noblest characteristics of her nature; and in
that experience she resembles the sentimental Frédéric, her brother
in delicacy as in weakness. If the man of society, young, rich, intel-
ligent, spoils his hours one by one, as a child who cannot draw,
uncleanly and foolishly spoils his sheets of fair white paper, he does
so because he has surrendered himself too freely to the charm of the
books and dreams which enchanted his youth, and has longed too
eagerly for higher emotions, for romantic affections, and glorious
adventures.
Again, if the two grotesque protagonists of 'Bouvard et Pécuchet'
make the most imbecile use of their late-coming independence, of
their will and energy, it is because the hearts of these bureau clerks
suddenly released from servitude beat with the noblest zeal for the
Ideal,-in that form, however, "which deceives the least; that is,
science" and do not say that singleness of heart is lacking in these
more than in the others.
Again, it is the romantic novelist who wrote the story of Un
Cœur Simple,' the pathetically foolish adventure of an old maid who
adores with religious fervor a stuffed paroquet. And again, do not
that the decadence of contemporary society is responsible for
these failures. Would it have been better for these men and women
to take root in the soil of a world still new, and to share the heroic
youth of civilization? The sinister brutality, staining red the land-
scapes of Salammbô,' answers the question. Matthô, like Frédéric,
like the daughter of Hamilcar, like the child of Farmer Ronault,
struggles painfully in the heavy nightmare of existence; the gloomy
frenzy of the savage has no more appreciable result than the shrink-
ing trepidation of the civilized man. Nor will it suffice to say that
these civilized folk and these barbarians were alike wanting in that
great supernatural strength, faith. St. Anthony the hermit of the
Thebaid, after years of maceration, cries, like Emma, like Frédéric,
"Of old I was not so wretched! "* The depth of his penitence has
but intensified his power to feel and suffer. A cataleptic, haunted
*The Temptation of St. Anthony. '


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5818
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
by visions, terrified at night by the howling of the jackal, by the
desert winds, by the shadow of a cross upon the sand, at last he
bows down like a slave before the stupid and inert Thing, shapeless
and multiform Matter. "I would," he sighs, "that I were Matter! ”
Supreme aspiration, containing the drama, at once tragic and farcical,
of our poor humanity! An appeal which recalls Goya's picture of a
skeleton straining to lift up the stone of his tomb to write upon it
the terrible word Nada,-"Nothing! " There is nothing! "Who
knows? " wrote Flaubert himself in one of his letters: "doubtless
death has nothing more to tell than life. "
* Lamennais of himself.
II
For the source and principle of this pessimism, one must search
through the four volumes of correspondence recently published. It is
easy to see that this way of feeling and of judging life is not with
the author of 'Madame Bovary,' as with so many others, an amuse-
ment of dilettantism. It is the deep and personal moral of these
frank letters that the convincing force of a work of art is always
proportionate to its sincerity. If to Flaubert's readers his creations
have this authenticity of authority, it is because they are struck out
of his own life and spirit. I mean that they express what was essen-
tial in his life, and most personal, least incidental, in his spirit.
The whole difference between objective artists, among whom Flau-
bert enrolled himself, and the subjective school, is that the first
exclude all anecdote, all petty individual and local circumstance,
from their written confessions. They can give expression to their
genius only when they reveal the inmost depths of their nature.
From the first, Flaubert's letters show that his heart, as another
great unquiet spirit declared, was "born with a wound. »* To-day
we know that his mental structure was sustained by an organism
prematurely touched at the very centre of life. Epilepsy was de-
stroying Flaubert. The Souvenirs' of Maxime Du Camp contain a
very touching account of the first attack of this fatal nervous mal-
ady. But long before that attack, a hypersensitiveness, strange
alternations of exaltation and repression, of enthusiasm and disgust,
indicated that a secret malady was preying upon this robust fellow.
From his twentieth year he contended with those humiliating fatali-
ties against which human energy, however ambitious, is doomed to
dash itself. Moreover, he was environed by contradictions.
His prose astonishes the reader by the lyric amplitude of his least
sentence. A poet quivers in the prose writer with all the passion, all
the ardor, of a Shakespeare or a Byron. Now, this poet was the son


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GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
5819
of a surgeon. His early life, from 1821 when he was born, to 1839
when he came to Paris to study law, was passed in a hospital. His
room overlooked a court where the invalids walked, and an amphi-
theatre where his father's pupils dissected bodies. The dreams of
his childhood and youth moved side by side with horrible impres-
sions of physical decay. He speaks somewhere of his nature as
"drolly bitter. " This sinister humor was doubtless born in that hos-
pital room where by turns he read his favorite authors,— Homer,
Eschylus, Virgil, Dante, Victor Hugo,- and saw the rollicking stu-
dents smoke and jest over the cadavers. The contrast was not less
sharp between his precocious taste for imaginative literature and the
employment his father wished him to undertake. He has drawn in
'Madame Bovary' under the name of Doctor Larivière a slight but
vigorous portrait of this father, whom he deeply admired. But it is
nevertheless true that the rough practitioner, with his grim profes-
sional aspect and his habit of working on living matter, could not
comprehend his second son's vocation for authorship. All the letters
of this period bear traces of this cruel misunderstanding. As a mere
lad, Flaubert lived in a state of constant rebellion against the pater-
nal ideas and discipline. Nor was he more in harmony with the
ideas and discipline of his time. When only fifteen he began to be
fascinated by romanticism and its poets, at the very moment when
public taste was ready to find fault with that school of 1830, which
should rather be called the school of 1820. Finally, as his correspond-
ence clearly shows, this romantic youth, whose ideal was incarnated
in the adorable figure of Madame Arnouse, an only love, never real-
ized, always dreamed,- suffered the precocious disenchantment of a
French school. What strange collisions of alien elements! How fate
delights to entangle us in those irresistible impulses which set us
forever in disharmony with life and with ourselves!
For Gustave Flaubert, played upon by such discordant influences,
life soon became one long suffering. Soon too he perceived that
this suffering was caused by no one mitigable chance, but that it
grew out of the very fact of existence. In the long correspondence
which extends from his precocious childhood to his premature old
age, which shows us his student's cell, his traveler's tent, his Parisian
abode of the famous author, he never varies his complaint. Whether
writing to Le Portevin, his schoolfellow; to Du Camp, the comrade of
his youth; to Louis Bouilhet, the associate of his maturity; to Lou-
ise Colet, the confidante of his critical days of apprenticeship; or to
George Sand, the glorious alter ego of his years of achievement, every-
where and always he proclaims the narrowness of human destiny;
the misery and sadness of existence; his distaste for his contempo-
rary world; his horror of the future; the weariness of enduring; the
•


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5820
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
woefulness of yielding; the falsehood of desire; and the vanity of
hope.
The persistence of these lamentations is the more striking in that
this pessimist is never disheartened. His fearless agnosticism has
nothing in common with the languid negations of a Werther or an
Obermann. No coward soul utters his accusation. His complaint.
almost from the beginning, is more intellectual than sentimental. All
the sweet poisonous melancholy on which he fed himself may be re-
ferred to the understanding rather than to the moral nature; and
therein appears the characteristic which distinguishes him absolutely
from authors who, like Byron, Châteaubriand, Musset, and Baudelaire,
have expressed under very different forms what has been called the
malady of the age.
In Flaubert, the contemporary of Taine, Renan, Berthelot, Pasteur,
there is a scientific turn of mind. He is like the physiologist who
from the symptoms of his own specific malady reasons to the general
disease, and who finds in his own personality the opportunity to verify
and to register a vaster hypothesis. Here we touch the explanation
of the typical character of the work and the man.
Because of this scientific turn of mind, united to a sensibility both
complex and passionately sad, Gustave Flaubert stands as one of the
newest of the psychological oddities of our age. There is no denying
the fact, however we dislike it, that in this nineteenth century science
has been the all-powerful controller of human activity. Not only has
it modified the material conditions under which this activity works,
but still more has it changed our point of view and altered our men-
tal methods. It has accustomed us to an idea which seems at first
sight simple, yet which involves an immense revolution, the con-
templation of everything as conditional, including even the most
spontaneous creations of the mind. Thus we come to acknowledge,
with Taine and Sainte-Beuve, that fixed laws control the production
of literary work, and that a tragedy, a novel, a poem, are born under
conditions as absolute as those which accompany the blooming of a
flower. Laws govern the production of political systems and religious
hypotheses, laws regulate the decadence and prosperity of races, of
countries, of families,-laws, finally, dominate our own intellect and
our own affections.
-
-
It must not be forgotten, however, that this conception leaves
room for personal responsibility. Our free will is simply set to
choose among these conditions those which will or which will not
produce certain effects. But whether the will choose freely or not,
these conditions always imply the same result. They share, and we
share with them, in that universal and immeasurable order which
science declares to exist. and which, fragment by fragment, detail by


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GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
5821
detail, she aims to discover. Thus considered, our individuality both
diminishes and is increased. It diminishes because we see with too
implacable clearness the limitations of our power, thus hedged about
by laws which are independent of our volition. It increases, because
outside our puny selves we catch glimpses of, we grasp at, those
imperishable laws which were before we were, which will be when
we are not. Beyond our own lives we thus touch and outlive all
life; beyond our own joy, all joy; beyond our own suffering, all suf-
fering. Such amplitudes of feeling do we gain with this new atti-
tude of mind! As it was constant with Flaubert, many men of our
generation have loved in him that profound accent in which they
heard a magnificent echo of the inarticulate speech hidden in their
own hearts.
III
Pessimism, however original and however sincere, yet remains a
disease; and had Flaubert brought only this message of despair he
would not occupy his high place in our respect. Happily he brings
another doctrine, that of heroism, and I had almost said of religion.
Flaubert himself employs this word, when speaking in one of his let-
ters of Alfred de Musset: "He lacked religion," he says; "and reli-
gion is indispensable. " What he meant was that in this life, so
wretched in his eyes and so foredoomed to failure, a man perceives
nobility, finds comfort, only upon condition of devoting all his powers
to something apart from himself and his interests, from his passions
and his person. Perhaps this creed of the most exalted renunciation
following on the completest pessimism is less contradictory than it
appears; for the Christian faith, itself the most luminously hopeful
which has ever appeared upon earth, rests also upon a pessimistic
vision of man and of fate.
-
And if Flaubert were inconsistent in his beliefs, let us applaud the
lack of logic which produced his masterpieces. His personal religion
was that of literature. He loved it with the most unrestrained, the
most untiring love. I do not know in the intellectual order a more
pathetic drama than that which fills his letters to the friend of
his youth, her whom he called his "Muse. " Housed in his small
abode at Croisset near the gates of Rouen, and scarcely going out
except to pace his garden on the bank of the Seine, this man of
thirty undertook to write a book with which he should be,—not satis-
fied, for what author worthy the name is ever satisfied? but which
should come as near perfection as possible. That book is 'Madame
Bovary. ' The very ideal of the literary artist is here evoked before
our inward gaze: the absolute, the irremediable scorn of contempo-
rary success, the contempt for vanity, the complete absence of all
desire for gain, these elementary virtues of the great author are


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5822
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
naturally found there, as well as the scrupulous conscience which no
difficulty discourages, and the invincible patience which no beginning
over again wearies; and especially and everywhere the flame, the
sacred fever of creative intellect. In these pages usually scratched
off at morning after the nightly task was finished - there stirs a
sublime breath which draws tears. One seems to see, one sees, the
genius of one of those immortal works which, like Tartuffe,' like
the 'Pensées,' like the 'Caractères,' will endure as long as the
French language. Never was human brain possessed by more pas-
sionate frenzy for art; and in saying that all Flaubert's great works
were composed in the same way, with this prodigious care in detail,
this implacable search for truth and beauty, this zeal and tenacity, it
is plain why in thirty years of this exhausting work he composed so
few volumes, and these of such virile composition, of such sovereign
mastery of style, that all other modern works seem slight, cowardly,
and incomplete beside them.
-
It is difficult to explain in what Flaubert's style-his great title to
glory-exactly consists. No term is oftener employed, indeed, than
this term "style. " None more easily defies a definition. In saying
that an author has style, some writers praise his elegant correctness,
while others mean to affirm his original incorrectness. According to
the first sense, the masters of style in France would be Fénelon,
Buffon, Rousseau. According to the second sense, they would be
Rabelais and Saint-Simon. The citation of these names suffices to
prove both points of view legitimate. The complexity of things im-
poses the complexity of points of view. To write is indeed to trans-
late ideas into words. But what must we understand by this formula,
ideas? I have the idea of a straight line, I have the idea of the feel-
ing I experience, I have the idea of the room where I am. Are these
three kinds of ideas of the same order, and are the trains of access-
ory impressions which each entails equally diverse?
The phrases which serve as the external form of these three kinds
of ideas must then be so different that certain French writers of the
seventeenth century considered literature incapable of rendering those
of the third group. Again, in our own time, Stendhal and Merimée
absolutely denied that sensations of the eyes are reducible to words.
Flaubert was of the contrary opinion. To his mind the thing had
been proved, since Châteaubriand; and the men who failed to repro-
duce an actual contour or color in a phrase seemed to him as incom-
petent as did they whose prose failed to express an abstract idea or
to convey an emotion. He maintained that Merimée did not under-
stand his profession, and this he would demonstrate book in hand!
In what, then, did his conception of his profession consist? In the
first place, in a special development of intellectual sensibility; and
here Flaubert was certainly right. An isolated word taken by itself


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GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
5823
should have its value of tone for the author, as the color on a palette
has its value of tone to the painter. Considered in the dictionary,
this word has a physical and moral existence perceived by the artist.
Take at random one which is typical. Does not the word frêle (frail),
which nevertheless comes from the same Latin word (fragilis) as fra-
gile, differ from the latter as a flower differs from an object of human
industry? Are there not words of race whose presence at the end of
a pen or on the tip of the tongue betrays a patrician manner of feel-
ing and thinking, while others reek of bad company and soil the
paper on which the pen traces them? It is not their meaning which
gives them this elegant or brutal, this ignoble or aristocratic char-
acter. It is the trace, visible or not, of their Latin origin, their tonic
accent, their sonority, and still other elements which cannot be ana-
lyzed and which the artist discerns through practice. For Flaubert,
the profession of authorship consisted in developing in himself this
sense of the physiognomy of words to the point of always finding the
exact, and as he maintained, the only, term to express a truth, a form,
a feeling. "For there is only one," he said to his favorite pupil
Maupassant; and as to himself, his rigor was unsparing. Another
of his friends, and his fervent admirer, M. Taine, told me that he
had seen him spend three weeks hunting for a single word, and that
was the word secouer, to shake. He was very proud of finishing his
story of 'Hérodias' with the adverb alternativement, " alternately. "
This word, whose two accents on ter and ti give it a loose swing,
seemed to him to render concrete and almost perceptible the march
of the two slaves who in turn carried the head of St. John the Bap-
tist.
The choice of words resembles the choice of colors in painting.
The value of a tone changes with the value of the tone placed next
it. Therefore the second step in authorship consists, once the words
are chosen, in putting them together and in constructing sentences.
Flaubert's theories on sentence structure have become legendary.
All his biographers have told us how he passed nights declaiming
his own prose, crying his sentences with all his might, trying them,
as he said in his common but expressive phrase, with his own
muzzle. " There was something of mania and something of paradox
in this method. There was also a theory. He set it forth himself
in his very curious preface to the 'Dernières Chansons' of Louis
Bouilhet. Flaubert thought that a well-constructed phrase adapts
itself to the rhythm of the respiration. He reasoned a little like
this: In presence of such or such an idea we experience such or such
an impression. This impression has its rebound in our organism. It
leaves it colder or warmer; our blood beats quicker or slower; our
breath is hurried or stopped. The phrase which translates this idea


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5824
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
should accord with this state of our organs; and how better ascertain
this than by trying it with the register of our chest? "Badly con-
structed sentences," said he, "never resist this test. " Now follow
the consequences of this principle. They are infinite, and the art of
writing, thus conceived, becomes difficult enough to terrify the most
patient. If sentences are made to be read aloud, harmony is their
ruling quality; and from that spring these two laws: constant renewal
of forms, and suppression of all rhyme, of all hiatus, and of all rep-
etitions. Goncourt recounts in his journal that he saw Flaubert
unhappy because he had left the following expression in Madame
Bovary: "d'une couronne de fleurs d'orange" (with a wreath of orange-
blossoms). The three d's, governed each by the other, made him
despair. He strove furiously to reduce the words which serve as set-
ting to the others: the conjunctions, the prepositions, the auxiliary
verbs. He fought for hours and days against que, de, faire, avoir, être.
Dumas, who scarcely liked him, mocked this formidable labor, so dis-
proportioned to the result: "He is a giant," said he, "who strikes
down a forest in order to make a box. " This witty epigram only
proves that the author of the 'Demi-Monde' was a moralist, a mind
preoccupied from the beginning with the service rendered; while
Flaubert was an artist, the most careful and uncompromising of art-
ists. Somewhere in his correspondence he speaks of a bit of wall on
the Acropolis, the memory of which exalted him like a vision of per-
fect beauty. This comparison completely illustrates his ideal of style:
a prose holding itself erect by virtue of essential words, and so finely
and strongly constructed that these essential words-correct, exact,
and precise, resting upon each other without parasitic attachments-
are beautiful both in themselves and for their mathematical relation,
a prose which is such an integral substitute for the object that it
becomes the object itself. "The author in his work," he said with
curious eloquence, "should be like God in the universe: everywhere
present and nowhere visible. Art being only second to nature, its
creator should exercise analogous methods, so that one feels in every
atom, every aspect, a hidden, a limitless insusceptibility of injury
from external things. " Was I wrong to speak of religion as influen-
cing a man who found these solemn accents to define his dream of
art?
paul Boung in


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GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
5825
THE SACRED PARROT
From Un Coeur Simple
THE
HE sighs which Madame Aubain uttered while knitting beside
her window, reached Félicité at her spinning in the kitchen.
They often walked up and down together under the trellis,
talking of Virginie, and wondering if such and such a thing
would have pleased her, or what she would have said upon such
an occasion.
All her little belongings were kept in a cupboard in the room
with two beds, and Madame Aubain looked them over very sel-
dom. But one day she resigned herself to the task, and moths
flew out of the wardrobe.
Virginie's dresses hung in a row under a shelf, upon which
were three dolls, some hoops, a little housekeeping set, and the
wash-bowl. They drew out all the skirts, the stockings, the
handkerchiefs, and spread them on the two beds before refolding
them. The sun shone on all these poor things, and brought out
the spots and the creases made by the movements of the body.
The air was warm and blue, a blackbird was warbling, every-
thing seemed to live in profound calm. They came across a
little brown plush hat with long hairs, all worm-eaten. This
Félicité took for her own.
Their eyes, meeting each other, filled
with tears; at last the mistress opened her arms, the servant
threw herself in them, and they clung to each other, satisfying
their sorrow in a kiss which made them equal.
It was their first embrace, for Madame Aubain was not of an
expansive nature. Félicité felt grateful to her as for a benefit,
and cherished her with religious veneration and the devotion of
a faithful animal.
Her kindness of heart increased.
When she heard the drums of a regiment in the street, she
stepped outside the door with a pitcher of cider and offered the
soldiers a drink. Wher they were ill she cared for hem. She
was kind to the Poles, and there was one who even wanted to
marry her.
But this made trouble; for coming back from church.
one morning, she found that he had gone into her kitchen and
made himself a vinegar stew, which he was tranquilly eating.
After the Poles she devoted herself to Father Colmiche, an old
man who was said to have taken part in the horrors of '93. He
X-365


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GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
lived on the river-side in the rubbish of a pig-sty. The street
urchins watched him through chinks in the wall, and threw stones
which fell on the wretched bed where he lay groaning, shaken by
catarrh; with his hair very long, his eyelids inflamed, and on his
arm a tumor larger than his head. She took him linen, tried to
clean the squalid hole, dreamed of establishing him in her bake-
house in some way that would not trouble Madame. When the
cancer had gathered, she bandaged it every day. Sometimes she
brought him cake, or placed him in the sun on a bunch of straw;
and the poor old man, driveling and trembling, thanked her with
his dying voice, feared to lose her, and stretched out his hands
to her when he saw her going away. He died, and she ordered
a mass for the repose of his soul.
That very day a great joy came to her. Just at dinner-time
Madame de Larsonnière's colored man arrived, with the parrot in
his cage, and perch, chain, and padlock. A note from the Bar-
oness informed Madame Aubain that her husband had been pro-
moted to a prefecture. They were going away that evening, and
she begged Madame Aubain to accept the bird as a remembrance
and with her respects.
He had long busied the imagination of Félicité, for he came
from America and thus recalled Victor; so she had often asked
the negro about the bird. Once she had said, "How happy
Madame would be to have him!
The negro had repeated this speech to his mistress, and as
she could not take the parrot with her, she thus disposed of it.
He was called Loulou. His body was green, the ends of his
wings pink, his forehead blue, and his throat gilded.
But he had a tiresome mania for biting his perch, pulling out
his feathers, and scattering water from his bath, so that he an-
noyed Madame Aubain, and she gave him to Félicité.
She attempted to teach him, and soon he was able to repeat,
"Fine fellow! Your servant, sir! I salute you, Mary! "
He was
placed near the door, and several people expressed surprise that
he did not answer to the name of Jacquot, like other parrots.
They called him a ninny and a blockhead, which names were like
dagger-thrusts to Félicité! Strange obstinacy of Loulou, who
would not speak when any one was looking!
Nevertheless, he was fond of company; for on Sunday
when the Mademoiselles Rochefeuille, M. De Houppeville, and
some new-comers-Onfroy the apothecary, M. Varin, and Captain


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GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
5827
Mathieu- had their game of cards, he beat the window-panes
with his wings and chattered so furiously that it was impossible
to speak.
Bourais's face seemed to amuse him greatly. As soon as he
saw it, he began to laugh, to laugh with all his might. The
outbursts of his voice escaped into the court, echo repeated them,
the neighbors coming to their windows laughed too; so that to
avoid being seen by the parrot, M. Bourais used to creep along
the wall, holding up his hat to screen his profile until he reached.
the river and entered by the garden door. His glances at the
bird lacked affection.
Once Loulou, having buried his head in the butcher-boy's
basket, received a fillip, after which he always tried to pinch him
through his shirt. Fabu threatened to wring his neck, although
he was not a cruel fellow, in spite of his great whiskers and the
tattooing on his arms. On the contrary, he had rather a liking
for the parrot, so that in his jovial humor he wanted to teach
him to swear. Félicité, frightened at this behavior, placed Lou-
lou in the kitchen. His little chain was taken off, and he wan-
dered about the house.
When he went down-stairs he rested the curve of his beak
on the step and raised first his right claw and then the left, and
she feared these gymnastics would make him dizzy.
He fell ill,
and could not speak or eat. There was a thick spot under his
tongue such as chickens sometimes have, and she cured him by
tearing this out with her nails. One day M. Paul was rash
enough to blow the smoke of a cigar in his nostrils. Another
time, when Madame Lormeau was teasing him with the end of
her parasol, he snatched off the ferule. At last he lost him-
self.
She had placed him on the grass to refresh him, left him a
moment, and when she returned,- no parrot! At first she looked
for him in the bushes, on the bank of the stream, on the roofs,
without heeding her mistress, who was calling, "Be careful! You
are mad! » Finally she visited all the gardens of Pont l'Évegne;
and she stopped the passers. "Perhaps you have seen my par-
rot somewhere? " and to those who did not know him she gave
a description. All at once she thought she saw something green
flying low down behind the mills. But when she reached the top
of the bank, it was gone. A peddler assured her that he had
just seen him in Mother Simonne's shop at Saint Mélaine. She


## p. 5828 (#416) ###########################################

5828
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
hurried there, but they did not know what she was talking about.
At last she went home, exhausted, her shoes in rags, sick at
heart; and seated near Madame in the middle of the bench, she
was telling all her adventures, when a light weight fell on her
shoulder, Loulou! Where the mischief had he been? Prom-
enading in the suburbs, perhaps.
She found this hard to get over; or rather, she never did get
over it.
-
In consequence of a chill she had a sore throat, and soon after
an ear-ache. Three years later she was deaf, and talked very
loud even in church. Although her sins might have been pro-
claimed to all the corners of the diocese without disgrace to her
or harm to the world, still the priest judged it advisable to hear
her confession only in the vestry.
Illusory murmurings began to trouble her. Her mistress often
said to her, "Good Heavens! how stupid you are! " and she
answered, "Yes, Madame," looking around her as if for some-
thing.
The little circle of her ideas kept on narrowing; and the
chiming of the bells, the lowing of the cattle, no longer existed
for her. All the beings about her worked with the silence of
phantoms. One sound only now reached her ears,- -the voice of
the parrot.
As if to divert her, he mimicked the tic-tac of the turnspit,
the shrill cry of the fish-man, the saw of the carpenter who lived
opposite; and when the bell rang he imitated Madame Aubain,—
<< Félicité! the door! the door! "
――――――
They held dialogues together, he uttering to satiety the three
sentences of his repertory, and she answering with words as
meaningless, but in which her heart overflowed. In her isolation
Loulou was almost a son, a lover. He scaled her fingers, nibbled
her lips, clung to her fichu; and as she bent her forehead toward
him, shaking her head as nurses do, the broad flaps of her cap
and his wings vibrated together.
When the clouds gathered and the thunder rumbled, he uttered
cries, remembering perhaps the showers of his native forests.
The dripping of water excited his frenzy; he flew madly about,
went up to the ceiling, upset everything, and flew through the
window to dabble in the garden. Then he returned quickly to
one of the andirons, and hopping to dry his feathers, showed
now his tail and now his beak.


## p. 5829 (#417) ###########################################

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
5829
One morning of the terrible winter of 1837, when she had
placed him before the fireplace on account of the cold, she found
him dead in the middle of his cage, his head down, and his claws
in the iron bars. Doubtless a congestion had killed him. She
believed that he had been poisoned with parsley, and without the
slightest proof she suspected Fabu.
She wept so much that her mistress said, "Well! have him
stuffed. "
She consulted the apothecary, who had always been kind to
the bird. He wrote to Havre: a certain Fellacher undertook
the task. But as packages were sometimes lost from the stage,
she decided to carry the bird herself as far as Honfleur.
Leafless apple-trees were ranged along the way. Ice covered
the ditches. Dogs barked about the farms; and her hands under
her mantle, with her little black sabots and her light basket, she
hurried along in the middle of the street.
She crossed the forest, passed Haut-Chêne, and reached Saint-
Gatien. Behind her in a cloud of dust and precipitated upon her
by the descent, a mail-coach came flashing along on a gallop.
Seeing this woman who did not trouble herself to get out of the
way, the driver stood up under the hood, and the postilion called
too, while the four horses, whom he could not hold in, increased
their speed. The first two grazed her; with a pull at the reins
the driver jerked them to one side, but furious, he raised his
arm with his great whip, and as he flew past he dealt her such
a blow that she fell on her back.
Her first movement, when she had regained consciousness, was
to open her basket. Happily Loulou had not been hurt. She
felt her right cheek burning, and when she put her hand to it
she found that blood was flowing.
She sat down on a stone and mopped her face with her
handkerchief. Then she ate a crust of bread which she had
taken the precaution to put in her basket, and comforted herself
by looking at her bird.
When she reached the height of Ecquemauville she saw the
lights of Honfleur sparkling in the night like a quantity of stars;
farther off the sea stretched confusedly. Then a weakness seized
her; and all the misery of her childhood, the deception of her
first love, her nephew's departure, Virginie's death, came back to
her one after another, like the waves of the tide, mounting to
her throat and stifling her.


## p. 5830 (#418) ###########################################

5830
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Then she wished to see the captain of the boat; and without
telling him what she was sending, she commended it to his
care.
Fellacher kept the parrot for a long time. He always prom-
ised it for the next week, but after six months he announced that
he had sent a case, and thus put an end to the uncertainty. It
began to seem as if Loulou would never return. "They must
have stolen him! " she was beginning to think.
At last he arrived,- magnificent, erect on the branch of a
tree which was screwed into a mahogany base, one foot in the
air, his head on one side, and biting a nut, which in his love of
effect the taxidermist had gilded.
She shut him in her room. This place, to which she did not
often admit people, looked like both a chapel and a bazar, it was
so full of religious objects and of oddities. In fault of a stand,
Loulou was established on a part of the chimney-piece which
protruded into the room. Every morning when she woke up she
saw him in the early light, and without sorrow and full of tran-
quillity she recalled his vanished days and insignificant actions to
their least details.
Not communicating with any one, she lived in the torpor of a
somnambulist. The processions of Corpus Christi reanimated
her. Then she went to the neighbors to beg candlesticks and
straw mats for the altar which was raised in the street.
In church she always looked at the picture of the Holy Ghost,
and thought it like her parrot. This resemblance impressed her
all the more in an image by Épinal, representing the baptism of
our Lord. With his purple wings and emerald body, it was a
true portrait of Loulou. She bought it and hung it instead of
the Count D'Artois, so that in the same glance she could see
both. They were associated in her thoughts; the parrot seemed
sanctified by this connection to the Holy Ghost, who thus became
more living and intelligible to her. The Father could not have
chosen a dove to announce him, since that bird has no voice,
but rather one of Loulou's ancestors. And as Félicité prayed
she looked at the image, but from time to time she turned a
little toward her bird.
She wanted to join the Sisters of the Virgin, but Madame
Aubain dissuaded her.
In the month of March 1853 Madame Aubain had a sudden
pain in her breast; her tongue seemed covered with smoke;


## p. 5831 (#419) ###########################################

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
5831
leeches could not calm the oppression, and on the ninth evening
she died at exactly the age of seventy-two.
Félicité wept for her as masters are not wept. That Madame
should die before her, troubled her mind and seemed contrary to
the order of things,— inadmissible and monstrous.
Ten days later (the time to come from Besançon) the heirs
arrived. The daughter-in-law searched the drawers, chose some
furniture, and sold the remainder. Then they returned to the
registry office.
Madame's arm-chair, her centre-table, her foot-stove, the eight
chairs, were gone. The places where the engravings had hung
showed in yellow squares on the walls. They had carried off
the two beds with their mattresses, and none of Virginie's be-
longings remained in the cupboard! Félicité climbed up-stairs,
drunk with grief.
The next day there was a sign on the door, and the apothe-
cary cried in her ear that the house was for sale.
She tottered and had to sit down.
What troubled her most was the thought of leaving her room,
so convenient for poor Loulou. Covering him with an anguished
look, she implored the Holy Ghost, and fell into the idolatrous
habit of kneeling before the parrot while she said her prayers.
Sometimes the sun, coming in at the dormer window, fell on his
glass eye, and it sparkled with a luminous ray which threw her
into ecstasy.
Her mistress had left her an income of three hundred and
eighty francs. The garden supplied her with vegetables. As to
clothes, she had enough for the rest of her life, and she econo-
mized lights by going to bed with the dark.
In order to avoid the broker's shop, where some of Madame's
old furniture was displayed, she scarcely ever went out. After
her dizzy turn she dragged one leg, and as her strength grew
less, Mother Simonne, who was bankrupt in her little grocery,
came every morning to cut wood and draw water.
Her eyes grew weaker. She no longer opened the blinds.
Thus many years passed, and the house was neither rented nor
sold. In the fear that she might be sent away, Félicité never
asked for any repairs. The shingles were rotting on the roof.
All one winter her bolster was wet. After Easter she spit blood.
Then Mother Simonne brought a doctor. Félicité wanted to
know what she had. But in her deafness only one word came


## p. 5832 (#420) ###########################################

5832
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
to her "pneumonia. " It was familiar to her, and she answered
gently:-
--
―――――
"Ah! like Madame," finding it natural to follow her mistress.
The time for the street altars was drawing near.
One was always placed on the shore, a second before the post-
office, the third near the middle of the street. There were rival-
ries as to the position of this last, and finally the parishioners
selected the court of Madame Aubain.
The fever and oppression increased. Félicité mourned that
she could not do anything for the altar. If she only had some-
thing to put on it! Then she thought of the parrot. The neigh-
bors objected that it was not fitting. But the priest gave her
permission, and this made her so happy that she begged him to
accept Loulou, her one treasure, after her death.
From Tuesday to Saturday, the eve of Corpus Christi, she
coughed oftener. That evening her face was drawn, her lips
stuck to her gums, she vomited; and the next day, feeling her-
self very low, she summoned a priest.
Three kind women were with her when she received extreme
unction. Then she declared that she must speak to Fabu.
He came in his Sunday clothes, ill at ease in this mournful
atmosphere.
"Forgive me," she said, trying to hold out her arm. "I
thought you killed him. ”
What did she mean by such nonsense? To suspect a man
like him of murder! —and he grew angry and was going to storm.
"She has lost her mind, that's plain enough. "
From time to time Félicité talked to visions. The good
women went away. Mother Simonne breakfasted.
A little later she took Loulou and carried him to Félicité.
"Come, say good-by to him! "
He was no longer a body: the worms were eating him; one
of his wings was broken, the tow was bursting out of his breast.
But blind now, she kissed his head and held him against her
cheek. Then Mother Simonne took him back to the altar.
The odor of summer came from the pastures; flies were buzz-
ing. The sun made the river sparkle and warmed the slates.
Mother Simonne, who had returned, was calmly sleeping.
The church bells woke her.