Something to Declare: Essays on France and French Culture (25 page)

When she died in 1876, Victor Hugo noted in his diary, “Mme Louise Colet is dead. Hers was a generous heart.” Du Camp composed a disobliging epitaph (“Here lies she who compromised Victor Cousin, ridiculed Alfred de Musset, vilified Gustave Flaubert, and tried to assassinate Alphonse Karr”); he also devoted several unflattering pages to her in his
Souvenirs littéraires,
which, according to Gray, set off a tradition of “Colet-bashing.”

There certainly was such a tradition (consider the mere title of Gérard-Gailly's 1934 study,
Les Véhémences de Louise Colet),
though one less monolithic than Gray makes it sound. A simpler explanation of any comparative forgetting of Louise would be that she had used up her fame in her own lifetime, and wrote no one book which either merit or saleability could sustain in print. Her most durable success was
Enfances célèbres,
an instructive work for younger readers about the childhoods of the famous. Indeed, you could argue that the attention of the Colet-bashers, far from obliterating her, kept her alive. Her memory was preserved—if in a distorted and semi-demonized fashion—by her very association with Flaubert. You could further argue that the self-same moustachioed life-raft also kept afloat Louis Bouilhet and Maxime Du Camp. They are still vividly with us, even though Bouilhet's verse is as out of print as Louise's, and Du Camp's six-volume work on Paris as hard to find as Colet's four-decker on Italy. Is not Du Camp also unfairly neglected? He was an energetic and inquisitive writer, for all his careerism and malice—a description which makes him sound uncommonly like Louise Colet.

Gloria Steinem in her book on Marilyn Monroe identified the “rescue fantasy” provoked in many men by the mere thought of the actress. Something of the same feeling often afflicts us when we peer into the past: not
him
again, we complain, as some Great White Male looms, casting his baneful shadow like a manchineel tree. Still, to call Louise Colet “heretofore obscure,” as Francine du Plessix Gray does, only makes sense if we define that phrase as meaning “not previously biographed in English.” There are times when she seems to have embarked upon a deeply misconceived rescue fantasy: wading heroically into the sea only to discover that Louise is not drowning but waving.

One of the problems of Colet's case is this: the fact that she was patronized by a generation of male Flaubertistes doesn't make her a better writer or a less infuriating person. The most useful, and touching, parts of Gray's book deal with Colet's later years, when, intrepid, troublesome, and isolated, she carries on working and fighting. But throughout, Gray, though resolutely engaged, cannot help noting her “extreme pride,” “frequent rages,” “monumental talent for self-deception”; or calling her “this most demanding of women,” a “one-woman public relations factory” who was “capable of extravagant name-dropping.” You begin to wonder how anyone put up with her for longer than strictly necessary. “She always came too early and stayed too late,” was Gautier's view. “She wouldn't have left Flaubert alone with his pedicurist.”

But Gray is committed to her defence and vindication, and this frequently leads her into special pleading. Rescuing Louise seems to necessitate demeaning others (Hippolyte, Mme Flaubert, and Flaubert's “buddy network,” as Gray terms it). It means accepting the word of this “one-woman public relations factory” far too easily. It means making authoritative statements (such as “He was clearly the first man with whom she enjoyed ecstatic sex”) without the slightest bibliographical back-up, and recklessly introducing whole episodes from
Lui
into the narrative as if they were objectively established fact. Sometimes an inappropriate twentieth-century template is fitted over nineteenth-century life; sometimes Gray regards as exceptional to Colet, or to women, circumstances shared by others. When Louise takes up fashion journalism (at which she seems to have been rather good), Gray feelingly writes that she was “bound to be humiliated by her need to grind out harebrained fashion chronicles.” Perhaps so, but it was a humiliation shared later in the century by a more famous male poet: Mallarmé.

And if Flaubert studies have skewed our understanding of Colet—as they have—this vindication is also skewed in that it observes Flaubert simply from Colet's point of view. His other relations with women are scarcely mentioned: they were varied, complex, and normally enduring. Louise brought out one side of his amatory nature; she got into his heart and under his skin in a way that no one else ever did. They were, however, severely ill matched in temperament, sociability, aesthetics, ambitions, and even sexual drive. Flaubert also seems to have been more suited to old love than to new love. In his letters to Louise he often gives the impression of hastening not so much towards further discoveries about the beloved as towards a position of established love—he is looking forward to looking back. Could there ever have been a “happy ending”—and if so what might that have been? Wasn't it just a case of waiting for when the rapture gave way to the rupture? Certainly Louise's plan that she and her daughter should transport themselves to Normandy and make some sort of extended rural family seems the ultimate fantasy. As far as we know, they never met again after the mid-1850s.

Du Plessix Gray is right to assert the centrality of Colet's position in the making of
Madame Bovary,
and the centrality (though not the uniqueness) of her place in Flaubert's heart. But was she “the first to recognize and encourage his genius”? (What about Alfred Le Poittevin, Du Camp, and Bouilhet?) Was she “the love of his life”? (Yes, but so in their different ways were Le Poittevin and Mme Schlesinger.) Did she “offer him a unique self-assurance about his vocation”? (Not to judge by the astonishing artistic confidence of his letters.) In her desire to right what she sees as a historical wrong, Gray finds herself making claims which will stagger any Flaubertiste. For instance, Gustave sent Louise his early work—
Novembre,
the first
Tentation,
and the first
Education sentimentale.
According to Gray: “How grateful Flaubert was for Louise's keen insights into the workings of his talent!” Well: in 1847 Maxime Du Camp wrote to Louise warning her that Gustave had been “profoundly wounded by the extravagant praise” she had lavished on
Novembre.
In 1852 Flaubert wrote to her about the first
Education:
“I am astonished, my dear friend, by the excessive enthusiasm you express over certain parts of the
Education.
They seem to me good, but not very much more so than the other pages you refer to. In any case I don't agree with your idea of cutting out the whole section about Jules and making something separate of it … Those pages which you were particularly struck by (on Art, seem pretty easily done to me.” If he was marginally less grudging over her response to the
Tentation,
this was in the context of Bouilhet and Du Camp having previously advised him to throw the work on the fire: “Well, you
are
enthusiastic about
Saint Antoine.
At least I'll have one supporter. Although I don't accept everything you say, I think my friends don't appreciate everything that was in it … As for the change you suggest, we'll talk about it—it is
huge.”

Which brings us back to the letters. The way Francine du Plessix Gray tells it, there is no doubt at all over what happened in and around Flaubert's fireplace on that night in May 1879.

Suddenly, in the middle of a particularly thick packet of letters, he comes across a package tied with a narrow ribbon. He opens it very slowly, takes out a small silken shoe; inside it is a faded rose rolled in a woman's handkerchief, its lace yellow with age. Flaubert kisses these three relics sorrowfully. Then he throws them into the fireplace along with the thick sheaf of letters that surrounds them, wiping his eyes. Dawn has come [etc].

This makes a poignant, precise, and, to some, enraging scene; but it's worth checking back to what Maupassant actually wrote. For a start, he quotes Flaubert as outlining the task ahead of them:
“Je veux brûler toutes mes vieilles lettres non classées. Je ne veux pas qu'on les lise après ma mort.”
(“I want to burn all my old unclassified letters. I don't want anyone to read them after my death”). Gray renders this as: “I want to burn most of my old letters, things I don't want anyone to read.” Here “all” has become “most”: Gray is leaning on the translation to make it accord with what subsequently happens. More culpably, she suppresses that little phrase
“non classés.”
In other words, Flaubert has done a previous
triage
of his papers, and this is a further sorting-out of the remainder. Since his relationship with Colet had terminated in 1856, and it is now 1879, should we not at least consider the possibility that Flaubert made his decision on Louise's letters during that earlier classifica tion? He might have a) burnt them then; b) saved them (which points the finger back at Caroline); or even c) saved them then, only to change his mind subsequently and destroy them.

Together, Maupassant and Flaubert then pull out a trunk full of papers.
“Je veux en garder une partie, et brûler l'autre,”
says Flaubert (“I want to keep part of them, and burn the rest”). Gray again leans on the translation. “I want to keep a small part and burn the rest.” (The “small” is her invention.) The letters are in chronologically reverse order, later ones on the top, earlier ones underneath: Flaubert therefore embarks on a strange reverse journey through the documents of his life. There are letters from the living and the dead, the famous and the insignificant, from friends and acquaintances; sometimes Flaubert drops a tear, sometimes he barks at the inanities he comes across. Early on, he finds a letter from George Sand, later one from his mother. These are the only two correspondents identified by Flaubert—or, to be exact, remembered by Maupassant as having been identified by Flaubert. The silence here is surely significant. Would Flaubert have burnt several hundred letters from Colet without mentioning the fact? And why should Maupassant not report it if he did? Additionally and alternatively, though the emphasis is on what Flaubert destroyed that night, what about the many papers he saved? After all, in his letter to Laporte he said that the next day his hands were still “shaking from tying up packets.”

Then comes the discovery of the three relics. There is a slight problem here. Maupassant describes “a little silk dancing-shoe,” but as Hermia Oliver comments, “That slipper was not a dancing-shoe; it was Louise Colet's slipper, or pair of slippers (perhaps Maupassant overlooked one of them).” Perhaps he did; but then it was four a.m., and they had taken “several glasses of old claret” with dinner. Flaubert casts the slipper, singular or plural, into the flames, together with the rose and the handkerchief. He had discovered this sentimental bundle, “in the middle of a particularly thick packet of letters,” and he now throws the relics on to the fire followed by “the thick sheaf of letters that surround them.” This is what Gray tells us. But this is not what Maupassant tells us, not at all. According to him, Flaubert simply found his souvenirs
“au milieu des lettres,”
i.e., among the letters in the trunk. There is no “particularly thick packet of letters,” no “thick sheaf,” except in Francine du Plessix Gray's novelistic head. She does it, no doubt, with the best of intentions: to dramatize the incident, to finger Flaubert, to point up what she believes to be the first step in a campaign to blot out Louise Colet, a male conspiracy which has finally brought Gray riding to the rescue. But as Flaubert once observed, you don't make art out of good intentions; and you don't make biography that way either.

*
Karr (1808–90) later retired to Nice to grow flowers professionally. Now totally forgotten as a writer, he remains an obscure link between the two greatest nineteenth-century novels of adultery. Stabbed by the future mistress of the author of
Madame Bovary,
he was also cited approvingly (on the subject of not invading Prussia) by Prince Shcherbatsky ten pages from the end of
Anna Karenina.
His name is commemorated in a tropical bamboo
(Bambusca glaucescens Alphonse Karr),
though rarely attached to the dictum he gave the world in 1849:
“Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.”

*
Edith Wharton on the naming of her cars after French writers: “One summer, when we were all engaged on the first volumes of Mme Karénine 's absorbing life of George Sand, we had a large showy car which always started off brilliantly and then broke down at the first hill, and this we christened ‘Alfred de Musset,’ while the small but indefatigable motor which subsequently replaced ‘Alfred' was naturally named ‘George.’”

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Drinking Ink