An epitaph for this expense of valor comes to mind: Flaubert’s words of mourning and consolation from a scene halfway into “Madame Bovary,” where Emma’s romantic effusions begin, fatally, to bore her lover Rodolphe. The manuscript has the aspect of a battlefield on which each inch of forward momentum has been wrested at exorbitant human cost from an implacable enemy.
Almost every line is altered or crossed out, then recopied dozens of times. He covered his leaves minutely, on both sides, with wiry black script. The writer so wary of self-indulgence was profligate with ink and paper. The draft of “The Sentimental Education” runs to twenty-five hundred shagreen-bound folio pages-a fortune in stationery. Less of the world is more for him because there can never be enough, and his discouragement with life sets the bar that his pitiless ambition keeps forcing him to transcend. But Sand, who foraged tirelessly for pleasure and companionship, and wrote with complacent fluency, misunderstood the tonic nature of Flaubert’s despair. “This man who is so kind, so friendly, so cheerful, so simple, so congenial, why does he want to discourage us from living?” she wondered rhetorically. Writers of an ironic temperament revere it for the qualities that have alienated the larger reading public: its arduous purity of style its uncompromising pessimism, free of cant and its refusal to ennoble human nature.įlaubert wrote a rabidly depressed letter about the novel’s reception to his friend George Sand, and she responded with a maternal nudge, typical of their correspondence, for she liked to pretend that his misanthropy was an affectation. The book was published in 1869, thirteen years after “Madame Bovary,” to excoriating reviews. I asked for Flaubert’s “The Sentimental Education.” This greatest Bildungsroman, one of the first modern novels, tells the mock-epic, tragicomic story of Frédéric Moreau, a provincial dilettante who fritters away an inheritance on the wrong women, friends, pleasures, investments, and causes, and whose ambitions are thwarted as methodically as his illusions are demolished. I had nearly all of French literature to choose from, but there was no contest. Toward the end of my stay, the curator offered to give me a going-away present: a day at my carrel with any manuscript in her archives. I once spent a year in the manuscript room of the old French National Library on the Rue de Richelieu.
“A romantic anarchist with a small private income,” Flaubert lived in the country with his mother for most of his writing life.
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