Something to Declare: Essays on France and French Culture (38 page)

Read Something to Declare: Essays on France and French Culture Online

Authors: Julian Barnes

With these few, tiny scenes, the sub-plot is primed and cocked, ready for Emma's second affair to fail, for her despair, her ruin, her suicide. Justin, for his part, is as potentially lost as any doomed lover. He is also as sex-crazed as any normal adolescent; Homais discovers him with a dirty book in his pocket. It has the pointed title of
Conjugal Love.
“And with pictures!” as the outraged pharmacist observes. Justin has also, we learn, asked Emma to take him into her service. Again, we are not given Justin's inner life, only a fleeting outer confirmation of what is already in place: a devotion,and a powerful sexual thrall, which sets up Justin's final and fatal participation in the plot. Emma, bent on suicide, demands from Justin the key to the laboratory, lies to him, overrules his protests, hustles him to what she seeks, and swallows a handful of arsenic. Naturally, we have eyes mainly for Emma at this time, so there are two aspects of Justin's story, rather than hers, which we might easily overlook.

The first is that though Emma is desperate, humiliated, ruined, and outcast, “She seemed to him extraordinarily beautiful, and as majestic as an apparition.” At this climactic moment Flaubert—for the first and last time—inserts us directly into Justin's head. Briefly, we both see and hear as he does. And what does he hear? Emma speaking in a whisper, “in a gentle, melting voice.” This is the
only
occasion in the novel when Emma speaks to Justin. This is a gauge of how brutal Justin's story is: he is in thrall to Emma, she never notices him, and his only use in her eyes is to enable her to kill herself. Imagine having that on your emotional record.

And the second aspect of this fatal scene is that it involves going upstairs. Emma leads, Justin follows, and they go upstairs together. In other words, the seduction is complete—that parallel, metaphorical, extended, unrealized, and often unnoticeable seduction, which reveals the fanatical care with which Flaubert composed his novel.

Justin has fulfilled his function. Will he be punished for his crime of aiding and abetting suicide, will magistrates need his expert opinion, as Homais predicted? It doesn't matter, because the real punishment, the real damage, lie elsewhere, and Flaubert wisely discards this legal side-issue. But he hasn't quite finished with Justin. At the lunch Homais gives for Dr. Larivière, there is a crafty—and crafted—repeat of that early image of Justin with the bowl of blood. This time he is holding a pile of plates. Homais wonders aloud where Emma might have got the arsenic. Justin begins to tremble, as before, and this time he drops the plates.

He is glimpsed three times more as Flaubert gives final shape to his novel. When Emma's funeral procession leaves the church,Justin appears at the door of the pharmacy: that's to say, he is watching her go on her final journey from the same spot from which he watched her set off to begin her adventure with Rodolphe. Emma is buried; later that night, with the village dark and silent, Flaubert lists those awake and those asleep. Emma's two faithless lovers, Rodolphe and Léon, are both out for the count; her two faithful lovers are still awake—Charles in his bed, Justin at her graveside, his heart “overflowing with a grief that was as tender as the moon and as unfathomable as night.” Finally, we learn, as if by afterthought, that Justin has run away from Yonville, run away to Rouen where he has become a grocer's boy. But this is much more than an afterthought: it's a reminder that Justin was a stranger to the village in the first place. He was taken in by Homais out of charity; and charity was the thing he failed to discover in Yonville. He arrives, he suffers, he flees: his time in Yonville is framed into an enclosed and traumatizing period.

One of the great leaps forward in opera was when recitative-and-aria gave way to through-composition. Something similar happened to the novel during the nineteenth century. It's instructive to read
Madame Bovary
side by side with
Middlemarch.
Both are novels of provincial life set back in time, one with the subtitle
Moeurs de province,
the other with the uncannily similar “A Study of Provincial Life.” Both are written with the keen sense that, as Eliot tells us on the last page of
Middlemarch,
the heroic age is past; both are works of powerful psychological insight; both are, for want of a better phrase, great novels. But the surprise, looking back from this distance, is that
Madame Bovary
was published in 1856–7
and Middlemarch
in 1870–1. In terms of fictional technique, Flaubert is far more sophisticated;
Middlemarch
reads like the novel of an earlier generation. Eliot holds our hand and directs our eye, and offers herself as a strong and opinionated authorial presence; Flaubert leaves us alone to find our own bleak way through his constructed universe. Eliot throws down her narrative in great blocks, side by side; Flaubert's narrative is through-composed.

There are many different (and conclusive) answers to the question, Why is
Madame Bovary
the first modern novel? One short way of answering is to say: Look at Justin. His is a tiny and unnoticed story as far as everyone in Yonville is concerned; yet one which, if we notice it, is shaped with as much care as any larger story in the novel. Justin's brief erotic tragedy goes as unnoticed in Yonville as Emma's erotic tragedy goes unnoticed in the wider world. He is an echo of her, that perfectly placed bit of kindling which makes Emma's story blaze the brighter. To change the metaphor: if
Madame Bovary
were a mansion, Justin would be the handle to the back door; but great architects have the design of door-furniture in mind even as they lay out the west wing.

Acknowledgments

Original versions of these pieces appeared as follows:

Richard Cobb:
New York Review of Books,
12 August 1999.
Georges Brassens:
Picador zi
(Pan Books), 1993.
Truffaut:
New York Review of Books,
n October 1990.
Elizabeth David:
The New Yorker,
21 September 1998.
Edith Wharton: Preface
to A Motor-Flight Through France
(Picador), 1995.
Tour de France:
The New Yorker,
21/28 August 2000.
Simenon:
Literary Review,
April 1992.
Baudelaire:
New York Review of Books,
20 November 1986. Courbet:
New York Review of Books,
22 October 1992. Mallarmé:
New York Review of Books,
9 November 1989.
Lottman:
London Review of Books,
4 May 1989. Vargas Llosa:
New York Times Book Review,
21 December 1986. Sartre:
London Review of Books,
3/16 June 1982.
Rage and Fire, a Life of Louise Colet,
by Francine du Plessix Gray,
New York Review of Books,
26 May 1994.
Flaubert,
Correspondance III, 185g–1868
(Gallimard),
Times Literary Supplement,
6 September 1991.
Flaubert and Turgenev, A Friendship in Letters
(Athlone),
London Review of Books,
23 January 1986.
Flaubert-Sand: The Correspondence
(Knopf),
New York Review of Books,
10 June 1993.
Flaubert, Correspondance IV, 186g–18j5
(Gallimard),
Times Literary Supplement,
18 December 1998.
Flaubert,
Carnets de Travail
(Balland),
Times LiterarySupplement,
7/13 October 1988.
Chabrol:
Writers at the Movies,
edited by Jim Shepard, HarperCollins (US), 2000.
Justin: “The Process of Art,”
Studies Offered to Alan Raitt
(Oxford), 1998.