The sophistication of the monks who renounce worldly pleasures for the love of God cannot be compared with the fullness and polymorphism of Flaubert who gave up life for the ambition of artistic creation.
He was both a Romantic and a Realist.
- Maugham
01 Childhood in Rouen
Gustav Flaubert was born in Rouen in 1821. His father was a doctor who served as the director of a hospital and lived there with his wife and children. It was a happy, respected, wealthy family. Flaubert's upbringing was no different from that of other French children of the same class; he went to school, made friends with other boys, was not very attentive to his homework, and read a lot of books. He was very emotional and imaginative, and like many sensitive children, he was trapped by the loneliness that was destined to be with him for the rest of his life.
"I went to school at the age of ten," he wrote, "and I soon began to resent humanity." It wasn't a quip, he really thought. He had been a pessimist since he was a teenager. It is true that romanticism was in full swing at the time, and pessimism was even more prevalent–just in Flaubert's school, a boy shot himself in the head and another committed suicide with a tie overhanging a beam; but we really cannot see why Flaubert, having a harmonious family, loving parents, a loving sister and sincere friends, still find life unbearable and human beings hateful. At that time, he was well-developed and looked very healthy in all aspects.
Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) was a French writer who wrote Madame Bovary and The Education of Emotions.
At the age of fifteen, he fell in love. It was there that the family went to Trouville, a small seaside village with only one hotel; it was there that they met Maurice Schlesinger, a music publisher and somehow adventurer, who was staying at that hotel with his wife and children.
It is necessary for me to paraphrase here Flaubert's later description of Madame Schlesinger: "She was tall, her complexion was dark, her dark hair was hanging down her shoulders; she had a high Greek nose, her eyes were bright as fire, her tall eyebrows curved in a charming arc, her skin radiated a radiance as if shrouded in a mist of golden light; she was slender and elegant, and you could even see the meandering cyan blood vessels on her brown-purple throat." In addition, the thin layer of fluff above her upper lip added a masculine and powerful look to her face, dwarfing the blonde beauty in front of her. She spoke slowly, her voice muffled, as soft and melodious as music. "I was a little hesitant to translate the word tourpré to purple, because it didn't sound very tempting, but it translates like that, so I have to speculate that Flaubert used it as a synonym for bright-hued.
Twenty-six-year-old Eliza Schlesinger was busy caring for her young son. Flaubert was very shy, and if it were not for the fact that her husband was warm and cheerful by nature and could easily make friends with people, he would not have had the courage to speak to her. Maurice Schlesinger took the boy on a ride, and on one occasion the three of them went out to sea by boat. Flaubert sat next to Eliza, shoulder to shoulder, her skirt pressed against his hand; she spoke to him in a low, sweet voice, but he was so distraught that he could not hear a word.
At the end of the summer, the Schlesingers left, the Flauberts returned to Rouen, and Gustav returned to school. The only true passion of his life began. Two years later, he visited Trouville again, only to learn that Eliza had been here but was gone. Flaubert was seventeen years old. It seemed to him that his former self was restless and therefore unable to truly fall in love with her; now his love for her was different, and now his love had contained male desires, and her own absence had made his desires more intense. When he got home, he picked up his "Memoirs of a Madman" that he had abandoned many times before, and told the story of the summer he had fallen in love with Eliza Schlesinger.
At the age of nineteen, in order to reward him for passing the entrance exam, his father sent him on a trip with a doctor named Claoghe to the Pyrenees and Corsica. By this time his body was fully developed, his shoulders were wide, and his peers called him a "giant", and he himself was so self-conscious. Although he was actually less than six feet, it did not seem tall today; the French were much shorter than they are today, and he was obviously much taller among his compatriots. His body was thin and elegant, his long dark eyelashes covered his large sea-green eyes, and his long hair fell straight down to his shoulders. Forty years later, a woman who met him in her youth recalls that he was as handsome as a Greek deity.
On the way back from Corsica, the traveling couple stopped briefly in Marseille, and one morning Flaubert, returning from swimming, noticed a young woman sitting in the courtyard of the hotel. He went over to say hello, and the two of them chatted, her name being Yularie Foucault, waiting to take a boat to French Guiana to be reunited with her husband, who was an officer there. Flaubert spent that night with Yularie Foucault, and according to his own account, the fiery night was as beautiful as the setting sun on the snow. After leaving Marseille, he never saw her again. But the experience left a deep impression on him.
02 Young Flaubert
Shortly thereafter, he went to Paris to study law, not because he wanted to be a lawyer, but because he had to choose a profession. He was bored in Paris, tired of both the law textbooks and the university life; he despised the mediocrity of his classmates, their pretense and bourgeois taste. While studying in Paris, he wrote a novella called "November", in which he wrote about his affair with Yularie Foucault. Still, he gave her tall curved eyebrows, lightly fluffy upper lip, and Eliza Schlesinger's lovely neck.
He visited the music publisher's office, where he contacted Schlesinger again and was invited to dinner with the couple. Eliza is still as beautiful as ever. Flaubert was still a clumsy half-sized man when he last met her, and now he was a handsome, enthusiastic, and eager man. He quickly became acquainted with the couple, often eating with them and occasionally taking short trips together. But he was still as cowardly and shy as before, and for a long time he did not have the courage to confess his love. But when he finally confessed, Eliza wasn't as angry as he feared, she just calmly told him that she wasn't ready to have a relationship other than a good friend. Her experience was quite peculiar.
Flaubert met Eliza in 1836, when he, like everyone else, thought she was Maurice Schlesinger's wife; however, this was not the case, and her husband was a man named Emile Judía, who was in serious trouble over the integrity problem, at which point Schlesinger stepped forward and offered to save him from the lawsuit, on the condition that he must abandon his wife and leave France. He agreed, and Schlesinger and Eliza Judea lived together. However, it was impossible to divorce in France at that time, and it was not until Judía's death in 1840 that the two were able to complete the marriage. It is said that although this unfortunate fellow was unable to accompany her and eventually died elsewhere, she still loved him deeply; perhaps it was for this reason, coupled with her loyalty to another man who had both given her a place to live and was the father of her children, that she hesitated and refused to accept Flaubert's desires. But he was extremely courteous, and Schlesinger was notoriously unfaithful to her. Flaubert's boyish infatuation may have touched her, and she was eventually persuaded to go to his apartment one day; he waited so eagerly that she did not appear. According to Flaubert's account in The Education of Emotions, biographers generally accepted the story because it seemed so credible that it was probably a true account of the events. In short, at least one thing is certain: Eliza never became his lover.
"Emotional Education", by Flaubert, translated by Li Jianwu, Shanghai Translation Publishing House
An event in 1844 that changed Flaubert's life and had a profound impact on his literary creation, which I will continue to reveal below.
On a dark night, he and his brother drove back to Rouen from a property in his mother's name. His brother was nine years older than him, and his son inherited his father's business as a doctor. Suddenly, without warning, Flaubert "felt a rush of heat wash over his mind, and he fell like a stone falling into the bottom of the pit." When he regained consciousness, he found himself covered in blood; his brother carried him to a nearby house, gave him blood, and after being sent to Rouen, his father gave him blood again, giving him valerian and wood blue, and forbidding him to smoke, drink alcohol, and eat meat.
He had severe seizures for some time. In the days that followed, his broken nerves drove him crazy. His illness has been shrouded in mystery, and doctors have explored it from different angles. Some assert that he must have epilepsy, and his friends basically held this view; his niece was silent on the subject in her memoirs; And Monsieur René Dumenelle, who wrote an important book on Flaubert, and who himself was a physician, claimed that Flaubert's illness was not epilepsy, but so-called "hysterical epilepsy". However, no matter what the disease, the treatment method is similar, Flaubert first used a large dose of quinine hydrochloride for several years, then switched to potassium bromide, and did not get rid of this drug for life.
The onset may not have surprised Flaubert's family. He told Maupassant that he had auditory and visual hallucinations when he was twelve, and it was well known. When he was nineteen years old, he was arranged to travel with a doctor, also because the treatment plan that his father later developed for him included a change of environment, and it seems that he was not born with the possibility of illness.
Flaubert and Maupassant
The Flauberts, though wealthy, were pedantic, old-fashioned, and tedious and frugal, so it was hard to believe that the son had merely passed the exams that all formally educated French boys had to take, and that they would have thought of letting him travel with a traveling companion who was a doctor. As a child, Flaubert felt that he was not like the people around him, and the serious pessimism of his early years was probably caused by his strange illness, which must have affected his nervous system from then on. In any case, now he must face the reality that he is doomed to be tormented by terrible illness, and since the onset of the disease is unpredictable and his lifestyle must change as a result, he decides to give up his law studies (it is not difficult to speculate that he must have done so willingly) and is determined not to marry for life.
In 1845, his father died, and two or three months later, his only sister, Caroline, also died after giving birth to a daughter. He has always been deeply in love with his sister. The two were inseparable from each other as a child, and Caroline was his closest friend until she married.
Shortly before his death, Dr. Flaubert bought a property called Cloise, on the banks of the Seine, which contained a two-hundred-year-old stone house with a terrace in front of it and a small gazebo overlooking the river at the back. The doctor's widow moved into the house with her sons Gustav and Caroline's infant daughter; her eldest son, Ashley, was now married and had inherited her father's position at the Rouen Hospital. Flaubert spent the rest of his life in Cloise.
He had been writing intermittently since he was very young, and now that illness had limited his normal life, he decided to devote himself to literature. He has a large studio on the ground floor with the Seine and gardens. He also established a very regular set of habits: getting up at ten o'clock, reading letters and newspapers, eating a simple lunch at eleven o'clock, going for a walk on the terrace after dinner, or sitting in the gazebo reading. I started writing at one o'clock in the afternoon, worked until dinner at seven o'clock, then went for a walk in the garden, and when I came back, I worked until late at night.
He closed the door and met only with a few friends, who he occasionally invited to live with him and discuss his work together. There were three such friends in all: Alfred Le Poitévan, who was much older than Flaubert and an old friend of their family; Maxime Ducan, whom Flaubert had met while studying law in Paris; and Louis Poyet, who lived on his meager income in teaching Latin and French in Rouen. All three loved literature, and Poyet himself was a poet.
Flaubert was gentle and loyal to his friends, but he was extremely possessive and harsh. Le Poittwan had no great influence on Flaubert, and when he learned that this man was about to marry a young lady named de Maupassant, he was furious. "The feelingS that this incident brought to me," he later said, "was like the irritation of a bishop's scandal to his followers when it was exposed." "As for Maxim Ducan and Louis Poyer, I will come to that later.
When Caroline died, Flaubert took a mold of her face and hands, and a few months later he traveled to Paris to ask the famous sculptor Ofa Palladier to make a bust of his sister. He met a poetess named Louise Colley in his studio in Paradir. She belonged to the kind of writers who were not uncommon among the literati, who believed that the operation of the left and right sources could completely replace talent; in addition, with the help of beauty, she was able to have a more or less place in the literary circle. She owns a salon patronized by many elites called "Muse". Her husband Hippolyte Colley was a professor of music, and her lover, Victor Cushing, a philosopher and politician, had already had a child with him.
Louise had curly blonde hair that matched the shape of her face, and her voice was soft and passionate. She claimed to be thirty years old, but in fact she was much older. Flaubert was twenty-five years old. In just forty-eight hours, after a small accident caused by Flaubert's nervousness, he became her lover, but he certainly failed to take the place of the philosopher, and although according to Louise herself, the man's relationship with her was entirely platonic at the time, but they maintained a public and formal relationship; three days later Flaubert bid Louise a tearful farewell and returned to Cloisser. That night he wrote a love letter to Louise, the first in a series of bizarre love letters he had since written to his lover.
03 Wind Moon Field
Years later, he told Etmund de Goncourt that he had a "wild" love for Louise Colle at the time; however, he was a man who was always exaggerated, and the contents of the correspondence between the two were difficult to confirm his claims. I suppose it is not difficult to speculate that he is proud to have an open lover; yet fantasies occupy a large part of his life, and he, like many people who are addicted to daydreaming, has more love when he is not with his lover than when he is together. However, he told Louise this with a little extra. She urged him to hurry to Paris; he told him that he could not leave his mother, who was suffering because of the loss of her wife, and she begged him to come to Paris at least more often; and he replied that he could only go far if he found a reasonable excuse. This made her ask angrily, "Are you being managed like a yellow flower girl?" ”
That's actually true. Each seizure would leave him weak and depressed for the next few days, which naturally worried his mother. His mother forbade him to swim in the river (but this was one of his hobbies), nor did he allow him to row on the Seine when he was unattended. As soon as he rang the bell and asked the servant to fetch something for himself, his mother would hurry upstairs to see if he was all right. He told Louise that his mother would not object if he offered to leave for a few days, but he could not bear the grief that this might bring to her mother. Louise certainly couldn't fail to see it, and if his love for himself was really as passionate as his love for him, then this kind of thing could not stop him from coming to see him. Even today, it's not hard for him to come up with a few plausible excuses to prove that he had to go to Paris. He was so young that if he didn't mind seeing Louise every so long, it was probably because he had been under the influence of a powerful tranquilizer for so long that he didn't have such a pressing sexual desire.
"Your love is not love at all," Louise wrote in the letter, "at least love has no meaning in your life." And he replied, "You want to know if I love you." Well, yes, I love you within my power; that is, in my opinion love is not the most important thing in life, it can only be relegated to the second place. ”
Flaubert was quite proud of his bluntness, although it was also cruel. His indecency is truly amazing. On one occasion he asked Louise to ask a friend who lived in Cayen about Eularie Foucault, whom he had had a sexual encounter with in Marseille, and asked her to help him carry the letter; Louise was shocked by the anger at the request. He had even told her about his experience hunting for prostitutes, and according to his own account, he was quite proud of the wind and moon field.
But there is no more serious lie for men than to boast about their sex life, and he probably doesn't have the ability he boasts about at all. He can be said to be quite indifferent to Louise. At one point, her soft and hard bubbles finally made him compromise, so he proposed to meet at a hotel in Mantis, where they could spend at least an afternoon together if she had departed from Paris early in the morning and he had rushed from Rouen, and he could have rushed home before dark. But to his surprise, this proposal actually made her very angry. In the two years that the relationship lasted, the two met a total of six times, and it was clearly Louise who proposed to break up.
At the same time, Flaubert was busy writing the book The Temptation of St. Anthony, which he had been brewing for a long time and planned to travel to the Near East with Maxime Dukan as soon as the book was completed. This was also agreed by The Elder Madame Flaubert, because the eldest son, Ashley, and Dr. Clauguet, who had accompanied Flaubert to Corsica many years ago, agreed that it would be beneficial to his health to stay in a warm country for a while.
After the manuscript was finished, Flaubert summoned both Dukan and Poyet to Cloise to read it to them. He read for four hours in the afternoon and four hours in the evening, and that was it for four whole days. They had already discussed it and had heard the complete work before they could start expressing their opinions. At midnight on the fourth day, Flaubert, who had finished reading the novel, slammed the table with his fist: "What? One of the two friends replied, "We think you'd better throw it into the fire and never mention it again." "It was a real blow. But after several hours of arguments, Flaubert finally accepted their opinion. Boyer then suggested that since Flaubert followed Balzac's example, he should write a realistic novel. It was already eight o'clock in the morning, and they went to bed separately.
Later in the day they gathered again to discuss the previous topics, and according to Maxim Dukan's Literary Memoirs, it was Poyet whose story in that discussion later became Madame Bovary; however, on the journey after Flaubert and Dukan, Flaubert, though mentioning in his letter many of the novel topics he was considering, did not contain Madame Bovary, so we can be sure that Dukan had misremembered.
The pair traveled to Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Greece, and they returned to Paris in 1815. Flaubert still hadn't decided what to try to write next, and It was probably at that time that Poyet told him the story of Eugène Delamar. Delamar is an intern who works as an inpatient physician or surgeon at the Hospital de Rouen and also has a clinic in a nearby town. His first wife, a much older widow than him, died as soon as Delamma married the young and beautiful daughter of a nearby farmer. Pretentious and extravagant, she soon grew tired of her boring husband and found several lovers in a row. She bought clothes without thinking about her family's financial resources, and the debt quickly accumulated to a desperate point. She eventually committed suicide by taking poison, and Then Drama also committed suicide. As everyone knows, Flaubert was very concerned about this unfortunate little story.
Shortly after returning to France, he was reunited with Louise Collet. Since their separation, Louise's situation has deteriorated. Her husband died, Victor Cushing interrupted funding for her, and no one wanted to accept the script she wrote. So she wrote a letter to Flaubert telling him that she would take Rouen when she returned from England; they met, and began to correspond again. He went to Paris again shortly afterwards and became her lover again. This is really puzzling. She was a blonde woman, over forty years old at this time, and blonde women were often not very resistant to aging, plus many women who regarded themselves as high at that time did not wear makeup. Perhaps he was touched by Louise's feelings for him, because she was the only woman he had ever loved, and he didn't seem to be very secure in terms of sex, or maybe the few sexes with her made him feel at ease. Her letters have all been destroyed, but his remains to this day.
It is not difficult to see from these letters that Louise has not grown much: she is still as domineering, critical, and annoying as ever. The tone of her letter also became more and more harsh. She kept urging Flaubert to move to Paris or to let her go to Cloise; and he kept making excuses, refusing to go or let her come. The emphasis of his letter was mainly on literary subjects, and only at the end was a perfunctory expression of feelings; the most interesting part of it was his reference to the difficult progress of Madame Bovary, into which he devoted all his energies at the time. From time to time, Louise would send the poems she had written to Flaubert. And his criticism is often very harsh. The relationship between the two inevitably came to an end.
Louise herself was the haste of this consequence. Victor Cuussing proposed to marry Louise, seemingly in consideration of the daughters they had given, as if she had deliberately let Flaubert know that it was because he had rejected the marriage. She had actually decided to marry Flaubert, but accidentally told her friend about the idea. Flaubert, who finally heard of this, was horrified, and after a series of heated arguments that made him both frightened and ashamed, he told Louise that he never wanted to see her again. But she was not discouraged, and ran to Clovasser to make a scene, and he threw her out cruelly, so cold that even his mother could not look at her. Although women will always stubbornly believe only what they are willing to believe, the "muse" eventually accepted the fact that Flaubert had completely broken with him. In retaliation, she wrote a supposedly rather clumsy novel in which she wrote him as a vicious fellow.
04 Fellow travelers in the times
I have to repeat the old story again. After the pair returned from the Near East, Maxime Dukan settled in Paris and bought a stake in the Paris Semi-Monthly. He went to Cloise and asked Flaubert and Poyet to write for himself. After Flaubert's death, Ducan also published two voluminous collections of commemorative essays, which he titled Literary Memoirs. It is ungrateful that all those who write about Flaubert will quote the book unceremoniously, but at the same time they dismiss its author.
In his book, Dukan writes: "Writers are divided into two categories: one that uses literature as a means and the other who sees literature as an end. I belong to and have long belonged to the former; all I ask for from literature is the right to love it and the right to care for it. "The category that Maxim Dukan has put himself in has always been large. People like them have literary tendencies, love literature, and often have talents, tastes, cultures and conditions, but they are completely devoid of creative talent. In their youth, they may still be able to write small poetry or decent novels, but before long they will be satisfied with what they think is a more relaxed way of life. Instead, they either commented on books or became editors of literary magazines; they wrote prefaces to anthologies of deceased writers, biographies of elites, research articles on literary subjects, and finally memoirs like Dukan. They also played a huge role in the literary world, and these people tended to be beautifully written, which made their works pleasant to read. There is no reason to look at these people differently as Flaubert despised Ducan.
People say that Dukan is jealous of Flaubert, and I think that is unfair. He once wrote in his memoirs: "I never wanted to elevate myself to the point of being able to compare with Flaubert, and I never allowed myself to question his extraordinary excellence." This statement is really fair and frank. While Flaubert was still studying law, the two lads who lived in the Latin Quarter became close friends; they went to eat together in cheap restaurants and talked about literature in cafes together. Later on their journey to the Near East, they were seasick together on the Mediterranean, drunk together in Cairo, and even went to prostitution together when given the chance. Flaubert was not a man to get along with, as he was impatient with dissenting opinions, irritable, arrogant and imperious. Even so, Ducan genuinely liked him and had great respect for him as a writer; but he knew Flaubert too well to turn a blind eye to his weaknesses; he had no reason to revere his young friend as a fanatical admirer of Flaubert. This hapless fellow was blamed relentlessly for this.
Only Louis Poyer has been Flaubert's closest friend. But Flaubert regarded him as a great poet– though it now seems to be a complete miscalculation – and trusted his advice and judgment immensely. He did indeed have been of great help to Flaubert, and if it had not been for Poyet, Madame Bovary might not have been written at all, or at least not the way it is today. It was Poyer, after a long argument, who persuaded Flaubert to write the outline of the story, which is also recorded in Francis Stimüller's masterpiece Flaubert and Madame Bovary. Poyer thought the book was promising, and in 1851, Flaubert, then Chinese New Year's Eve, officially began writing.
With the exception of The Temptation of St. Anthony, his more important early works have a strong personal color, which is actually the product of his own emotional experiences into novels. At this time, however, his goal was to be absolutely objective. He was determined to expose the truth and tell the story without prejudice or prejudgment; he portrayed the character without disparagement or praise, without attaching his own evaluation: if he sympathized with one character, he would not show it; if another character was stupid enough to make him angry, and a third character was so bad that he was annoyed, he would not allow his words to reveal this likes and dislikes. Overall, he achieved this very successfully, and this may be why many readers find his novels a certain sense of indifference. This meticulously crafted and unwavering detachment naturally has nothing to warm the heart. This may be our weakness, but it seems to me that it would be comforting for us readers if the author himself could share the emotions that he is trying to make us experience as we read it.
This article is excerpted from
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"Reading is a refuge to carry with you"
Author: William Somerset Maugham
Translator: Segovia
Publisher: Guomai Culture Jiangxi People's Publishing House
Publication year: 2020-7
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