Chapter X: Lessons in Art and Science (4)

This charming country is fertile in old stories of love and of ghosts. Julie knew them all. She was a skilful story-teller, this simple girl of the people, and endowed with a naturally fine and agreeable mind. Her ancestors, from father to son, had been postilions, rather bad fellows, and hard drinkers.

While Gustave was small he would sit beside her for whole days. In order to amuse him, Julie would join together all the legends she had heard around the fire with those she had read, and, having been kept in bed a year with a bad knee, she had read more than most women of her class.

The child was of a tranquil nature, meditative, possessing an ingenuousness of which he retained traces during his whole life. My grandmother has told me that he would remain for hours with a finger in his mouth, absorbed, and with an almost stupid appearance. When he was six years old an old domestic, called Pierre, used to amuse himself with that innocence; he would say to little Gustave, if he teased for anything, "Go now and look at the end of the garden, or in the kitchen and see whether I am there." And the child would go and say to the cook: "Pierre sent me to see whether he were here." He could not comprehend that they were deceiving him, and while they laughed, would stand thinking, trying to see through the mystery.

My grandmother had taught her oldest son to read, and, wishing to do as much for the second, put herself to the task. The little Caroline, beside Gustave, learned by degrees that she could not keep up with him, and he, being forced to understand this from signs of which no one said anything to him, began to weep large tears. He was, however, eager for knowledge, and his brain worked continually.

Opposite the hospital, in a modest little house in the Rue de Lecat, lived two old people, Father and Mother Mignot. They had an extreme tenderness for their little neighbour. Times without number, the child would open the heavy door of the Hôtel-Dieu, and run across to Father Mignot's knee, upon a signal from him. And it was not the good woman's strawberries that tempted him, but the stories the old man told him. He knew a great many pretty tales of one kind and another, and with what patience he related them! From this time Julie was supplanted. The child was not difficult to please, but had insistent preferences; those that he liked must be told him over and over again.

Father Mignot also read to him. _Don Quixote_ especially pleased my uncle; he would never let it be taken from him. And he retained for Cervantes the same admiration all his life.

In the scenes brought about by the difficulty of learning to read, the last irrefutable argument with him was: "Why should I learn, since Papa Mignot can read to me?"

But the age for entering school arrived. He must know once for all that his old friend could not follow him there. Gustave put himself resolutely to work, and at the end of a few months had caught up with the children of his age. He entered the eighth class.

He was not what one would call a brilliant pupil. Continually failing to observe some rule, and not troubling himself to understand his professors, punishments abounded, and the first prize escaped him, except in history, in which he was always first. In philosophy he distinguished himself, but he never comprehended mathematics.

Generous and full of exuberance, he had some warm friends whom he amused extremely by his unquenchable enthusiasm and good humour. His melancholy times, for he had them even then, he passed in a region of his mind accessible to himself alone, and not yet did he show them in his exterior life. He had a great memory, forgetting nothing, neither benevolences nor vexation of which he was the subject. Thus, he preserved for his professor in history, Cheruel, a profound remembrance, and hated a certain usher who had hindered him from reading his favourite book during the study hour.

But his years at the college were miserable; he never could become accustomed to things there, having a horror of discipline, and of everything that savoured of militarism. The custom of announcing the change of exercises by the beating of drums irritated him, and that of filing the pupils in rank when they passed from one class to another exasperated him. Constraint in his movements was a punishment, and his walk with the procession every Thursday was never a pleasure; not that he was feeble, but he had a natural antipathy for all that seemed to him useless motion. His antipathy for walking lasted his whole life. Of all exercises for the body, swimming alone pleased him; he was a very good swimmer.

The dull, labourious days of school life were enlivened by outings on Thursdays and Sundays. Then he saw his beloved family and his little sister, which was a joy unequalled.

In the dormitory during the week, thanks to some hidden pieces of candle, he read some of Victor Hugo's dramas, and his passion for the theatre was kept warm. From the age of ten, Gustave composed tragedies. These pieces, of which he was scarcely able to write the lines, were played by him and his comrades. A great billiard hall opening from the salon was given up to them. The billiard table, pushed to one end of the room, served as a stage, which they mounted by means of a crock from the garden. Caroline had charge of the decorations and costumes. His mother's wardrobe was plundered for old shawls, which made excellent peplums. He wrote to one of his principal actors, Ernest Chevalier: "Victory! victory! victory! victory! You will come, and Amédée, Edmond, Madame Chevalier, Mamma, two servants and perhaps some pupils, will be here to see us play. We shall give four pieces that you do not know. But you will soon learn them. The tickets of the first, second, and third classes are made. There will be some armchairs. There will also be scenery and decorations; the curtain is arranged. Perhaps there will be ten or twelve persons. So we must have courage and not fear," etc.

Alfred Le Poittevin, some years older than Gustave, and his sister Laura, were also a part of these representations. The family of Poittevin was bound to that of Flaubert through the two mothers, who had known each other from nine years of age at the _pension_. Alfred Le Poittevin had a very great influence upon my uncle in his youth, contributing to his literary development. He was endowed with a brilliant mind, full of life and eccentricity. He died young, which was a great grief. My uncle speaks of him in his preface to the _Last Songs_.

* * * * *

A few words about my grandparents and upon the moral and intellectual development of my uncle.

My grandfather, whose traits have been sketched in _Madame Bovary_, under those of Doctor Larivière, called in consultation to the bed of the dying Emma, was the son of a veterinary of Nogent-on-the-Seine. The situation of the family was modest: nevertheless, by denying themselves, they sent their son to Paris to study medicine. He took the first prize in the great competition and by this success was received as a doctor free of further cost. Scarcely had he passed his examinations when he was sent from Dupuytren, where he was house physician, to Rouen to Doctor Laumonier, who was then surgeon of the hospital. This sojourn was supposed to be only temporary, to restore his health, which had become enfeebled from overwork and a life of privation. But, instead of remaining for a few months, the young physician spent all his life there. The frequent appeals of his numerous friends, or the hope of arriving at a high place in the medical profession in Paris, which his successful beginning had justified, never decided him to leave his hospital and a people to whom he became profoundly attached.

But in the beginning, it was love which extended this sojourn,--love for a young girl, a child of thirteen years, a goddaughter of Madame Laumonier, an orphan in a boarding-school, who came each week to visit her godmother.

Anne-Justine-Caroline Fleuriot was born in 1794 at Pont-l'Evêque in Calvados. Through her mother she was allied to the oldest families in Lower Normandy. "A great noise is made," said Charlotte Corday in one of her letters, "about an unequal marriage between Charlotte Cambremer de Croixmare and Jean-Baptiste Francois-Prosper Fleuriot, a doctor without reputation." At thirty years of age Mademoiselle de Croixmare had been sent back to the convent. But the obstacles were finally conquered, the walls of the convent broken and the marriage took place. One year later a daughter was born, and the mother died in giving her birth.

The child, left in the arms of its father, became for him an object of tenderness and worship. At sixteen, my grandmother still remembered with emotion her father's kisses. "He would undress me each evening," she said, "and put me in my bed, wishing to take my mother's place." These paternal cares soon ceased. Doctor Fleuriot, seeing that he was about to die, gave his daughter in charge of two old ladies of Saint-Cyr who had a little school at Honfleur. These ladies promised to keep her until her marriage, but they, too, soon disappeared. Then her tutor, Monsieur Thouret, sent the young girl to Madame Laumonier, sister of Jacques-Guillaume Thouret, Deputy from Rouen to the States-General and President of that Assembly. She came at the same time as my grandfather, when they happened to see each other. Some months later they avowed their love and promised themselves to each another.

The Laumonier household, like many others of that epoch, tolerated, under a spiritual and gracious exterior, a certain lightness of morals. The eminently serious nature of my grandmother and her love preserved her from the dangers of such surroundings. Besides, my grandfather, more far-seeing than she could be, wished her to remain in the boarding-school until she was married. She was eighteen and he twenty-seven at the time of their marriage. Their purse was slender, but their hearts had little fear. My grandfather's portion was in his future; my grandmother had a little farm which brought her a revenue of four thousand francs.

The household was established in the Rue du Petit-Salut, near the Rue Grand-Pont, a little street of narrow houses, touching one another, where the sun could never penetrate. In my childhood my grandmother would often take me through there, and, looking at the windows, would say in a grave voice, almost religious: "Look, my child, the best years of my life were passed there."

Descended from a Champenois and a Norman, Gustave Flaubert had the characteristic signs of both races; his temperament was very expansive and, at the same time, it was enveloped in the vague melancholy of the people of the north. He was of even temper and gay, sometimes with a touch of buffoonery; but ever at the bottom of his nature was an undefined sadness, a kind of disquiet. He was physically robust, enjoying full, strong pleasures; but his soul, aspiring to an unattainable ideal, suffered without ceasing in not finding it. This applied to the smallest things; because, as a seeker after the exquisite, he had found that the most frequently recurring sentiment was nearly always one of grief. This without doubt added to the sensibility of his nervous system, which the violent commotions of a certain malady (to the paroxysms of which he had had many relapses, especially in his youth) had refined to an extreme point. That came also from his great love of the ideal. This nervous malady threw a veil over his whole life; it was a permanent fear obscuring even his happiest days. However, it had no influence upon his robust health, and the incessant and vigorous work of his brain continued without interruption.

Gustave Flaubert was something of a fanatic; he had taken art for his god, and like a devotee, he knew all the tortures and all the intoxications of the love to which he had sacrificed himself. After hours passed in communion with abstract form, the mystic became man again, was a _bon vivant_, laughed with a frank laugh, put a charming gaiety into the recital of a story, or some pleasant personal remembrance. One of his greatest pleasures was to amuse those about him. What would he not do to raise my spirits when I was sad or ill?

It was easy to feel the honesty of his characteristics. From his father he had received his tendency to experiment, that minute observation of things which caused him to spend infinite time in accounting to himself for the smallest detail, and that taste for all knowledge which made him a scholar as well as an artist. His mother transmitted to him his impressionability and that almost feminine tenderness which often made his great heart overflow and his eyes grow moist at the sight of a child. His taste for travel, he often said, came to him from one of his ancestors who took part in the conquest of Canada. He was very proud of counting up the brave ones among his own people, any one who had brains and was not _bourgeois_; for he had a hatred of the _bourgeois_, and continually employed that term as a synonym for mediocrity and envy, the living only with the appearance of virtue and insulting all grandeur and beauty.

At the death of Laumonier, my grandfather succeeded him as surgeon-in-chief of the Hospital. It was in this vast building that Gustave Flaubert was born.

The Hospital at Rouen, of the construction of the last century, is not wanting in a certain kind of character; the straight lines of its architecture present something of chasteness and something of the accepted modern types. It was situated at the end of Rue de Crosne, and as one came from the centre of the town he found himself face to face with the great arch of the iron gate, all black, behind which was a court-yard with willows planted in rows: at the end and built around the sides was the edifice.

The part occupied by my grandparents formed a wing, approached by a private entrance. At the left of the central gate, a high door opened upon a court where grass grew among the old paving stones. On the other side of the pavilion was a garden forming an angle with the street, bordered at the left by a wall covered with ivy and hemmed in at the right by the hospital buildings. These are high grey walls, punctured with little glazed holes to which meagre faces are glued, their heads bound in white linen cloths. These ghastly silhouettes with hollow eyes show great suffering and have a profound sadness about them.

Gustave's room was on the side of the entrance, in the second story. The view was upon the hospital gardens overlooking the trees, under whose verdure the patients sat on stone seats, when the weather was pleasant. From time to time the white wing of a great bonnet of one of the sisters could be seen rapidly crossing the courtyard, and sometimes there were visitors, the parents of the invalids, or the friends of the attendants, but never any noise or anything unexpected.

This severe and melancholy place could not have been without influence upon Gustave Flaubert. He ever retained an exquisite compassion for all human suffering, and also a high morality, which would scarcely be suspected by those who are scandalised by his paradoxes.

No one was less like what is usually called an artist than my uncle. Among the peculiarities of his character, the contrasts have always astonished me. This man, so preoccupied with beauty in style and giving form so high a place, even the highest, paid little attention to the beauty that surrounded him; his own furniture was of heavy contour, not the least delicate, and he had no taste for objects of art (bric-à-brac) so much in vogue at that time.

He loved order with a passion, carrying it to a mania, and would never work until his books were arranged in a certain fashion. He preserved carefully all letters addressed to him. I have large boxes full of them. Did he think there would be as much interest taken in them as there was later in his own? Did he foresee that great interest in his correspondence (which reveals the man in a light so different from that revealed by his works), that he imposed upon me the task of collecting and publishing it? No one can say.

He always observed extreme regularity in his work each day. He yoked himself to it as an ox is yoked to a cart, without waiting for that inspiration which expectation renders fruitless, as he said. His energy of will for all that concerned his art was prodigious, and his patience was tireless. Some years before his death, he would amuse himself by saying: "I am the last of the Fathers of the Church," and, in fact, with his long, maroon-coloured wrapper and a little black silk cap on the top of his head, he was something like a recluse of Port-Royal.

I can see him now running over the terrace at Croisset, absorbed in thought, stopping suddenly, his arms crossed, raising his head and remaining for some moments with his eyes fixed on the space above, and then resuming his walk again.

Life at the Hospital was regular, free, and good. My grandfather, who had attained a high reputation, medically, gave his children all that ease and tenderness could add to the happiness of youth. He had bought a house in the country, at Deville near Rouen, which he disposed of one year before his death, a railroad having cut through the garden only a few metres from the house. It was then that he bought Croisset, on the banks of the Seine.

Each year the entire family went to Nogent-on-the-Seine to the home of the Flaubert parents. It was quite a journey, which we made in a post-chaise, a veritable journey of the good old times. The thought of them brought many an amusing remembrance to my uncle; but those which were most charming to him were his vacations passed at Trouville, then but a simple fishing village.

He met there some English people, the family of Admiral Collier, all of whom were beautiful and intelligent. The oldest daughters, Gertrude and Henrietta, soon became the intimate friends of my uncle and my mother. Gertrude, now Madame Tennant, lately wrote me some pages about her youth. I translate the following lines:--

"Gustave Flaubert was then like a young Greek. In full adolescence,
he was tall and thin, supple and graceful as an athlete,
unconscious of the gifts that he possessed, physically and morally,
caring little for the impression he produced and entirely
indifferent to accepted form. His dress consisted of a red flannel
shirt, great trousers of blue cloth, a scarf of the same color
around his waist and a cap put on no matter how, or often
bare-headed. When I spoke to him of fame, or of influence, as
desirable things that I esteemed, he listened, smiled, and seemed
superbly indifferent. He admired what was beautiful in nature, art
and literature and lived for that, as he said, without any thought
of the personal. He cared neither for glory nor for gain. Was it
not enough that a thing was true and beautiful? His great joy was
in finding something that he judged worthy of admiration. The charm
of his society was in his enthusiasm for all that was noble; and
the charm of his mind was its intense individuality. He hated all
hypocrisy. What was lacking in his nature, was an interest in
exterior and useful things. If any one happened to say that
religion, politics, or business had as great an interest for them
as literature or art, he would open his eyes in astonishment and
pity. To be literary, an artist, that alone was worth living for."

It was at Trouville also that he met the musical editor, Maurice Schlesinger and his wife. Many faces remained engraved on his memory of his sojourns by the sea, among others that of an old sailor, Captain Barbet and his little daughter, Barbette, a little humpback always crying out to her dolls. Then there was Doctor Billard, and Father Couillère, mayor of the commune, at whose house they had repasts that lasted for six hours. He recalled these years in writing _A Simple Soul_. Madame Aubin, her two children, the house where she lived, and all the details so true, so appreciative, in this simple history, are of striking exactness. Madame was an aunt to my grandmother; Félicité and her parrot once lived.

In his last years, my uncle had an extreme desire to revive his youth. He wrote _A Simple Soul_, after his mother's death, to try to accomplish this. In painting the town where she was born, the hearth before which she had played, his cousins, the companions of his childhood, he found satisfaction, and that pleasure has brought from his pen his most touching pages, those perhaps where he allows us to divine most clearly the man under the writer. Recall that scene where Madame Aubin and her servant are arranging the trifling possessions that had belonged to Virginia. A large hat of black straw which my grandmother had worn awoke in my uncle a similar emotion. He would take that relic from the nail, look at it in silence, with eyes moistening, and then respectfully replace it.

Finally, the happy time of leaving college arrived, but the terrible question of choosing a profession, or taking up some career poisoned his joy. As a vocation, he cared only for literature, and "literature" is not a career; it leads to no "position." My grandfather wished his son to be a savant and a law practitioner. To devote himself to the unique and exclusive research for beauty of literary form, seemed to him almost folly. A man of character, eminently strong, and of very active habits, he comprehended with difficulty the nervous and somewhat feminine side which characterises all artistic organisations. With his mother my uncle found more encouragement, but she held to the point that he should obey his father, and he was resolved that Gustave should make his way in Paris. He set out, sad at leaving his own people, his sister especially.

At Paris he lived in the Rue de l'Est in a little bachelor apartment where he found himself badly installed. The noisy, free and easy pleasures of his comrades seemed to him stupid, so that he scarcely ever participated in them. He would remain alone, open one of his law books, which he would immediately put away, then extending himself upon his bed, he would smoke and dream for hours. He became very weary of this life, and grew sombre.

Pradier's studio alone put warmth in him again; he saw there all the artists of the day, and in contact with them he felt his instincts grow. One day he met Victor Hugo there. Some women visited the studio; it was there he met Louise Colet. He often went to see the pretty English girls of Trouville, to the salon of the editor, Maurice Schlesinger, and to the hospitable house of his father's friend, Doctor Jules Cloquet, who led him away one summer to the Pyrenees and to Corsica. The _Education Sentimental_ was composed in remembrance of this epoch.

But in spite of friendship,--doubtless in spite of love,--a weariness without bounds invaded him. His work, which was contrary to his taste, became intolerable to him, his health was seriously affected and he returned to Rouen.

My mother's marriage, her death the year following, and a little later that of my grandfather, left my grandmother in such grief that she was happy to keep her son near her. Paris and the Law School were abandoned. It was then that, in company with Maxime Ducamp, he made the journey through Brittany and they wrote together the book: _Over Strand and Field_. (_A travers les Champs et les Grèves._)

Upon his return, he began his _Saint Antoine_, his first great work. It had been preceded by many, of which fragments have been published since his death. The _Saint Antoine_ composed then, was not the first known to the public. This work was undertaken at three different times before it was finally finished.

In 1849 Gustave Flaubert took a second journey with Maxime Ducamp. This time the two friends directed their steps towards the Orient, which had for so long been their dream!

II.

My personal reminiscences date from his return. He came back at evening; I was in bed, but they awakened me. He came to my little bed, raised me suddenly and found me very droll in my long nightgown; I remember that it extended far below my feet. He began to laugh very hard and then to imprint great kisses on my cheeks which made me cry; I felt the cold of his moustache, humid with dew, and was very glad when he put me down again. I was then five years old and we were at the grandparents' house at Nogent. Three months later I saw him again in England, as I still remember distinctly. It was at the time of the first Exposition at London. They took me there and the crowd frightened me; my uncle took me on his shoulder, and I traversed the galleries overlooking everybody, this time happy to be in his arms. They chose me a governess and we returned to Croisset.

My uncle wished to begin my education immediately. The governess was to teach me only English; my grandmother would teach me to read and write, and for him was reserved history and geography. He believed it useless to study grammar, holding that it taught itself in reading, and that it was bad to charge the memory of a young child with abstractions, which one begins where often they ought to finish.

Then began some years when we were all together.

Croisset, where we lived, is the first village on the bank of the Seine in going from Rouen to Havre. The house, long and low in shape, all white, must have been built about two hundred years. It had belonged to the monks of the Abbey of Saint-Ouen whom it served for a country house, and it pleased my uncle to think that Prévost had composed _Manon Lescaut_ here.

In the interior court, where still remained the pointed roof and the guillotine-shaped windows of the seventeenth century, the construction was interesting, but the façade was ugly. It had undergone one of those remodellings in bad taste that were seen so often in the first Empire and the reign of Louis Philippe, at the beginning of the century. Above the entrance, after the fashion of bas-reliefs, were some villainous casts,--the seasons of Bouchardon--and the mantelpiece in the salon had on each side a representation of a mummy in white marble, a souvenir of the Egyptian country.

The rooms were few, but sufficiently large. The spacious dining-room, which occupied the centre of the house on the ground floor, opened upon the garden by a glass door flanked by two windows in full view of the river. It was pleasing and gay.

On the next story, at the right, a long corridor separated the chambers, and on the left was my uncle's study, or work-room. It was a large apartment, with a very low ceiling, but very light, because of five windows, of which three looked upon the whole length of the garden, the other two being in the front of the house. There was a pretty view of the turf, the beds full of flowers, the trees on the long terrace, and the Seine enframed in the foliage of a splendid tulip tree.

The ways of the house were subordinated to the taste of my uncle, my grandmother having, so to speak, no longer any personal life; she lived for the happiness of others. Her tenderness was in alarm at the slightest symptom of suffering which she thought she detected in her son, and she sought to envelop him in a calm atmosphere. In the morning she was on the defence against the least noise; towards ten o'clock the violent ringing of a bell would be heard, and some one would go to my uncle's room; not until then did every one awake. The domestic carried him his letters and newspapers, deposited on the night table a glass of fresh water and a well-filled pipe; then he opened the shutters, and the light streamed in. My uncle would seize his letters, run over the addresses, but rarely did he open one before taking a few whiffs from his pipe; then, having read them all, he would tap the neighbouring wall to call his mother, who would run in immediately and seat herself near his bed until he was ready to rise.

He made his toilet slowly, sometimes interrupting himself to go to the table and re-read some passage with which he was preoccupied. Although little complicated, his dress was not lacking in care, and his neatness expressed his refinement.

At eleven he came down to breakfast, where my grandmother, uncle Parain, the governess and I, were already assembled. We all loved uncle Parain infinitely. He had married my grandfather's sister and passed a great part of the year with us. At this time my uncle ate little, especially in the morning, finding that too much nourishment made him heavy and unfit for work. Almost never did he eat meat; only eggs, vegetables, a piece of cheese, fruit and a cup of cold chocolate. At dessert, he would relight his pipe--a little gray pipe--get up and go into the garden, where we followed. His favourite walk was the terrace walled in and bordered on one side by old willows cut straight across like a gigantic wall. This led to a little pavilion in the style of Louis XV., whose windows looked out upon the Seine. Very often on summer evenings we would all seat ourselves here under the balcony of graceful fretwork and remain for some calm hours, chatting together; the night would come, little by little, the last passers disappear; in the water opposite we could just distinguish the silhouette of a horse drawing a boat which glided along without noise; then the moon would begin to shine with a thousand sparkling rays, like a fine diamond powder, scintillating at our feet, while a light tug and two or three barques would slip from their moorings and invade the river. These belonged to the eel fishers who were starting at this time to set their nets.

My grandmother, who was very delicate, would cough, and my uncle would say: "It is time to return to the Bovary." The Bovary? What was that? I knew not. But I respected the name, those two words, as I respected everything that came from my uncle, and believed vaguely that it was a synonym for work, and work was writing, as was well understood. In fact, it was during these years, from 1852 to 1856 that he composed this novel.

We were rarely in the pavilion after breakfast. Fleeing from the midday sun, we mounted to a spot called "The Mercury," because of a statue of that god which formerly ornamented it. It was a second avenue situated above the terrace, which led to a charming shady footpath; some old yew-trees came out of the rocks in queer shapes, showing their bare roots and jagged trunks; they appeared to be suspended, holding only to the crumbling wall at the side by their roots. Above the alley was a kind of roundpoint, a circular bench concealed under some huge chestnut-trees. Through the branches one could see the tranquil waters and above them a large expanse of sky.

From time to time, a cloud would rapidly go by and vanish. It was the smoke of a steamboat; and immediately would appear between the interlaced branches the pointed masts of ships which were being towed to Rouen. Sometimes there would be seven, or nine. Nothing is more majestic and beautiful than the pomp of these floating houses, which suggest a far-off country. About one o'clock could be heard a sharp whistle; it was "the steamer," as they say in the country. Three times a day this boat crossed between Rouen and Bouille. The whistle was the signal of departure.

"Come," my uncle would say, "come to your lesson, my Caro;" and dragging me along, we would both go into his large study, where the shutters were carefully closed to keep out the heat. It was pleasant there; one breathed an odour of Oriental joss-sticks mingled with that of tobacco, also with perfumes that were wafted in through the door of his dressing-room. With a bound I would throw myself upon the great white bear-skin, which I adored, and cover his great head with kisses. My uncle, meantime, would be putting his pipe on the chimney-piece; and, selecting another, would fill it, light it, and seat himself in his leather armchair at the end of the room; he would cross one leg over the other, turn his back, take a file and begin to polish his nails, saying: "Let us see, where were you? Now, what do you remember from yesterday?"

"Oh! I know the history of Pelopidas and Epaminondas very well."

"Relate it, then."

I began, but naturally I became confused or I had forgotten.

"I am going to tell it to you once more," he would finally say.

Then I would approach and sit facing him on a long chair or upon the divan. I listened with a palpitating interest to the recitals that he made so amusing to me.

It was thus I learned all my ancient history, coming to the facts one after another, making reflections within my power, but remaining truly and profoundly observant; mature minds would have been able to listen without finding anything puerile in his teaching.

Sometimes I would stop him and ask: "Was he good?" And this question, applied to such men as Cambyses, Alexander or Alcibiades, was somewhat embarrassing for him to answer.

"Good?" he would say, "Yes ... these were not very proper gentlemen, but ... that is not the point."

But I was not satisfied, and I found that "my old boy," as I called him, knew even the smallest details of the people we were studying about.

The history lesson finished, we passed on to geography. He never wished me to study from a book. "Images, as many as possible," he said, "are the best means of learning in childhood." We had charts, spheres, games of patience which we could make and unmake together; then, to explain the difference between islands, peninsulas, bays, gulfs and promontories he would take a shovel and a pail of water and, in a little walk in the garden, make models of these in nature.

As I grew older, the lessons became longer and more serious. He continued them up to my seventeenth year, until my marriage. When I was ten years old, he obliged me to take notes while he was speaking, and when my mind was capable of comprehending it, he began to make me notice the artistic side of things, especially in my reading.

He considered no book dangerous that was well written; he held this opinion because of his intimate union of foundation and form: anything well written could not be badly thought out or basely conceived. It was not the crude detail, the raw fact that was pernicious or harmful, or likely to soil the intelligence; all that is in nature. There is nothing moral or immoral but the soul of him who represents nature, rendering it grand, beautiful, serene, small, ignoble, or tormenting. Such a thing as an obscene book well written could not exist, according to him.

Certainly he was very liberal in the reading he recommended to me, yet he was decided in allowing me nothing for amusement alone, and never would permit me to leave a book unfinished. "Continue to read the history of the Conquest," he wrote me, "and do not allow yourself to begin books and then leave them for some time. When one undertakes to read a book, it should be finished at a single blow. It is the only way of seeing it as a whole and of deriving any profit from it. Accustom yourself to following this idea. Since you are my pupil, I do not wish you to have that disconnected way of thinking, a mind unable to follow out anything, which is the attribute of persons of your sex."

He held to this intellectual discipline, judging it to be very useful. His teaching sought to impress itself upon my mind in the strongest manner possible. So easy in some ways, he was very rigorous on certain points; thus, he wished that the virtue of a woman consisted not alone of purity of morals, but that she might add that to what is exacted in an honest man.

My lesson finished, my uncle would seat himself at his table in his high-back, oak armchair and there remain until seven o'clock, allowing himself only a moment from time to time, to go to his window and breathe large whiffs of air. Then we dined, and chatted together awhile, as after breakfast. At nine o'clock, or ten at the latest, he would again take up his work with zeal, prolonging it far into the night. He was never more in the spirit of it than in these solitary hours when no sound could come to trouble him.

He remained thus many months in succession, seeing no one but Louis Bouilhet, his intimate friend, who came each Sunday, staying until Monday morning. A part of the night was passed in reading the work of the week. What delightful hours of expansion! There were loud cries of exclamation without end, some controversy over rejecting or keeping some epithet, or some reciprocal enthusiasm!

Three or four times a year, my uncle would go to Paris to pass some days at the house of the Helder's. All his distractions were limited to short absences. However, in 1856, having decided to publish _Madame Bovary_, he went to live at No. 42 Boulevard du Temple, in a house belonging to M. Mourier, director of the theatre of the _Délassements-Comiques_. Bouilhet was presenting his first piece, _Madame de Montarcy_, at the Odéon that year. He had already preceded his friend, left Rouen and his profession as tutor to live entirely by letters. My grandmother was not long in joining them; she spent some of the winter months in a furnished apartment, and two years later installed herself in the same house with her son, on the story above.

Although living so near, we were very independent. My uncle had taken into his service a valet named Narcisse, the queerest individual possible; he had been a domestic in my grandfather's house, and his drollery as well as his zeal prompted my uncle to engage him. Narcisse, an established farmer, married, and the father of six children, had left his wife and family with the greatest eagerness to follow the son of his old master for whom he had a respect amounting to fanaticism, but joined to that the greatest forgetfulness of difference in station. One day he returned completely drunk; my uncle perceived this and seated, or rather tumbled him into a chair in the kitchen. He aided him to reach his room, and to stretch himself out on the bed. Then Narcisse, in a supplicating air, said: "Ah! sir! complete your goodness by pulling off my boots." And this was done by the too indulgent master!

Our friends amused themselves with the reflections of this servant and his repartee; certain of them sent him their books. He was often found sitting in the study, or before a bookcase, with a feather duster under one arm and a book in his hand; he read in a high voice, imitating his master. But these artistic endeavours, joined to the abuse of small glasses, completely disordered the brain of the poor devil; and he was obliged to return to the fields.

During these winter months, I regretted the summer days because the great success of _Madame Bovary_ followed by a famous lawsuit had given to my uncle a celebrity that made him sought after. He went out much and I saw less of him.

The apartment of the Boulevard du Temple blossomed on certain days. It was a pleasure to give little repasts there to our intimate friends; I remember those in which I took part and which had around the table Sainte-Beuve, Monsieur and Madame Sandeau, Monsieur and Madame Cornu, these last brought by Jules Duplan, the faithful friend of Gustave Flaubert; then Charles d'Osmoy, and Théophile Gautier came very often, and on Sundays the door was open wide and friends were numerous.

This epoch was for my uncle the beginning of relations which lasted until his death. He assiduously frequented the _salon_ of the Princess Mathilde. He found gathered there scholars, artists, and some of his intimate friends; he relished strongly this intellectual and worldly life. He went also to the Tuileries and was invited to Compiègne; from his sojourn at the castle there came to him the thought of a great romance which should bring out the French and the Turkish civilisations.

Then he also had dinners at Magny which, in the beginning, numbered only half a score of people: Sainte-Beuve, Théophile Gautier, the two De Goncourts, Garvarni, Renan, Taine, the Marquis of Chennevières, Bouilhet and my uncle. Their conversations abounded in the highest interest.

Finally, the month of May arrived and we returned to the tranquil life at Croisset.

Beginning in 1860 to write _Salammbô_, my uncle soon perceived that a voyage to the site of what was once Carthage was necessary to him, and he set out for Tunis. On his return he accompanied his mother to Vichy. We went there the two years following.

My grandmother's health not permitting her to go out with me, my uncle took her place; he accompanied me in my walks and on Sunday even took me to church, in spite of the independence of his beliefs, or rather because of that independence. We often went when it was pleasant, and seated ourselves under the little white-leaved poplars along the main walk; he would read while I sketched, and interrupting his reading, he would speak to me of what it suggested to him, or begin to recite verse, or entire pages of prose which he knew by heart. What he most often recited was Montesquieu and Chateaubriand. His memory disclosed itself equally in dates or in historic facts. But let him recall some literary remembrance and he was truly surprising; in a volume read twenty years before he could name the page and the spot on the page which had pleased him; and, going straight to his library and opening the book, he would say: "Here it is," with a certain satisfaction which made the light shine in his eyes.

At Vichy he returned to old acquaintances: Doctor Villemain whom he met in Egypt, and Lambert Bey, one of the adepts of the _Père Enfantin_.

My marriage came in 1864, changing all our life. I lived a great part of the year at Neuville near Dieppe, going no oftener to Croisset than twice a year, in the spring and in the autumn. My uncle made only short visits at my house; any change of place troubling him extraordinarily and disturbing his work. It was necessary for him to work at an extreme tension, and it was impossible for him to find himself in this state elsewhere than at his great round table in his study, where he was sure that nothing would distract him. This love of tranquillity, which he carried later to an excess, had begun already to exercise a tyranny upon his least action. At the end of a few days, I could see that he was nervous and I felt that he was desirous of returning to his beloved labour.

For ten years our lives were less mingled, save for the month of April in 1871. When I returned from England where I had passed some months, I found him much changed. The war had made a profound impression upon him; his "old Latin blood" had revolted at this return to barbarity. Obliged to flee from his house,--for he would not for anything in the world be under the necessity of speaking to a Prussian,--he took refuge in Rouen in a little lodging near the Havre quay where he was badly housed. This seemed to be a bereavement; my grandmother, now aged, no longer occupied herself with the management of the household, and instead of transporting their furniture and necessary objects from the country to the town (and that would have been easy to do), they left all at Croisset, where a score of men, officers and soldiers, had established themselves.

The fatal lack of employment that a disturbed life brings, the thought of his study, his books, his home soiled by the presence of the enemy, brought to my uncle's heart and mind frightful anxiety and grief. The arts appeared to him dead. Why? Was it possible? Could it be that an intelligent country would cause these billows of blood? But there were scholars who were holding Paris in siege, and hurling projectiles against the monuments!

He thought that he should return to his house to find nothing there. He was deceived; save some trifling objects without value, such as cards, a penknife, or a paper-cutter, they had respected absolutely all that belonged to him. One thing only about the return was suffocating,--the odour of the Prussian, as the French call it, an odour of greased boots. The walls were impregnated with it, through their stay there of three long months, and it was necessary to paint and redecorate the rooms in order to get rid of it.

Six months passed without my uncle being able to write, and finally, he was at my house at Neuville when, yielding to my supplications, he began again, this time finishing _The Temptation of Saint Antony_.

There was in Gustave Flaubert's nature a sort of impossibility of being happy, and a tendency continually to turn back in order to compare and analyse. Even at the age of the most absolute joys, he dissected them so that he saw nothing in them but the skeleton of pleasure.

When, on descending the Nile, he wrote the pages entitled: _Au bord de la Cange_, he regretted his home on the banks of the Seine. The landscape under his eye never seemed to captivate him; it was later that he recalled it with pleasure, while man, with his foolishness, and his conversation, was intensely interesting to him. "Foolishness," he would say, "enters my pores." And when he was reproached for not going out more, or for remaining so much in the country, he would say indignantly: "But nature devours me! If I remain extended on the grass for a long time, I believe that I can feel the plants growing under my body"; and he would add: "You don't know what trouble confusion and change make me."

As to himself, in the most grievous events of his life he wrote down his sensations, seeking, scrutinising the most remote corners of his nature, however veiled or intimate. A fact in a newspaper, a droll story of people he knew, stupidities written by authoritative pens, the manifestation of their self-conceit or their greed, were to him so much subjects of experience that he recorded them and slipped them into his portfolio; he could not comprehend the art that sought only gain; according to him, mere money could not reward the artist; and between the five hundred francs which the editor Michael Levy sent him for his five years' work on _Madame Bovary_, and the ten thousand francs which he received some years later for _Salammbô_, he saw very little difference.

In his note-books of travel in the Pyrenees at seventeen years of age, he pointed out the silliness of the reflections of travelers about Lake Gaube and the inn near Gavarnie. Even here is the beginning of the _Dictionary of Accepted Ideas by Bouvard and Pécuchet_. This strong sense of the comic was useful in opposition to his love for the ideal, as his love for farce corrected his inborn melancholy.

III.

In 1875, the loss of a considerable sum of money changed our circumstances. My husband saw all that he had disappear in commercial transactions. Married under the dowry laws so common in Normandy, I could dispose of only a part of my property in his favour. My uncle made up the deficit with an entirely spontaneous generosity, giving all that he possessed to save our position. Nothing remained for him to live on except the interest that we had engaged to pay him, and the very mediocre revenue from his books. To sell Croisset was the thought which first presented itself to our minds; this property had been given me by my grandmother, with the expressed wish that her son Gustave should continue to live there. This consideration, added to my uncle's repugnance to separating himself from it, decided us in the resolution to keep it. Loneliness weighed upon his tender nature, and an arrangement of a life in common was agreeable to him. He passed the greater part of the time in the country; and, in Paris, having taken his apartment again in the Rue Murillo, we took one on the same landing, on the fifth floor of a house situated at the angle of the Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré and the Avenue de la Reine-Hortense.

We were then together as formerly, and our confidential talks were more frequent, deeper and more intimate than those of my childhood's days. In the retired life that we led, my uncle spoke to me as to a friend; we talked on all subjects, but preferably those of literature, religion and philosophy, which we discussed without any anger or disagreeable results, although we were often of a different opinion.

It is easy to see that a man who could write _Saint Antoine_ must be superabundantly occupied with religious thought as found in humanity, and its manifold manifestations. The old theogonies interested him extremely, and the excessive in all people had an infinite attraction for him. The anchorite, the recluse at the Thebans, provoked his admiration, and he felt towards them as towards the Bouddha on the bank of the Ganges. He often re-read his Bible. That verse of Isaiah: "How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings!" he thought sublime. "Reflect, sift the thing to the bottom," he would say to me enthusiastically.

A pagan on his artistic side, he was, through the needs of his soul, pantheistic. Spinoza, whom he much admired, did not fail to leave his imprint upon him. Besides, no belief of his mind, save his belief in beauty, was so fixed that it was not capable of listening to the other side, and admitting even, up to a certain point, the obverse. He loved to repeat with Montaigne, what was perhaps the last word of his philosophy, that it is necessary to sleep upon the pillow of doubt.

But let us return to the work of the day. Here he is happy in reading to me the freshly hatched phrase that he has just finished; I assist, as a motionless witness, the slow creation of these pages so labouriously elaborated. In the evening, the same lamp lights us, I, seated beside the large table, where I am employed with my needlework, or in reading; he, struggling with his work. Bent forward, he writes feverishly, then turns his back upon his work, strikes his arms upon those of his chair and utters a groan, for a moment almost like a rattle in the throat; but suddenly his voice modulates sweetly, swelling proudly: he has found the desired expression and is repeating the phrase to himself. Then he gets up and walks around his study with long steps, scanning the syllables as he goes and is content; it is a moment of triumph after exhausting labour.

Having arrived at the end of a chapter, he would often give himself a day of rest in order to read over at his ease what he had written, to see the "effect." He read in a unique fashion, chanting and emphasising so much that at first it seemed exaggerated, but ending in a way that was very agreeable. It was not only his own works that he read in this way; from time to time he would give real literary sessions, becoming impassioned with the beauty that he found; and his enthusiasm was communicative, so that it was impossible to remain cold, or keep from vibrating with him.