Flaubert’s “Un Coeur Simple”
“I worked 16 hours yesterday, all day today and by this evening I’ve finally finished the first page.”
In 1844, at the age of 23, Flaubert is in an open gig near Pont-l’Evêque. He experiences an epileptic attack.
After that he reaches a decision. “Life is such a hideous business, the only way to put up with it, is to avoid it. One avoids it by living in Art.”
He retreats to the family home outside Rouen and spends his remaining years under the beady eye of his mother. His great work stems from this period of concentrated isolation.
The precocious fluency of his early years has disappeared. He writes as though he is squelching through the Seine’s mudflats outside his window in Croisset.
Embarking on Un Coeur Simple he complains “I worked 16 hours yesterday, all day today and by this evening I’ve finally finished the first page.”
Why the hold-up? In a word, his search for the mot juste. Every sentence, every sound has to be just so.
After penning a few sentences, he reads them aloud. Over and over again, until they precisely express his underlying idea. For Flaubert, form follows function.
Listen to Fabrice Luchini’s recording of Un Coeur Simple. Hear him luxuriating in the pitch perfect cadences of the text. Surely an actor’s dream.
Various contemporary movements tried to claim Flaubert, in particular the Realists. He despised them. In his own words “I hate it. It is exactly this hatred which made me write Madame Bovary.”
Prior to publishing Trois Contes in 1877 Flaubert goes through a bad patch. A number of his closest friends die, then his mother, who leaves the property to her granddaughter, Flaubert’s niece. “L’Education Sentimentale” receives a hostile reception. Croisset itself is occupied by Prussian soldiers. Flaubert has mounting financial worries.
But Trois Contes is an immediate success. He is fêted and revered.
His close friend George Sand is the catalyst for Un Coeur Simple after she criticises his indifference, irony and pessimism. He states “I have begun Un Coeur Simple with the exclusive intention to please her”. He wanted to show he could write warmly and sympathetically.
The story draws extensively on childhood memories. Pont-l’Evêque and its environs. His beloved sister’s early death. Julie, the devoted servant who raised him, and is now the model for Félicité.
Indeed, Flaubert invites Julie to stay at Croisset while he is writing. She arrives feeble and almost blind. Flaubert doubtless does not elaborate on the literary fate awaiting her.
Flaubert likes to surround himself with props when he is writing. It explains the presence of the stuffed Amazonian parrot. He borrows it from Rouen Museum and it sits on his desk for three weeks. In the end it starts to annoy him.
The parrot is surely the most surprising character in the tale. It’s impossible not to think of Monty Python’s dead parrot sketch. Although Loulou only appears at the end of the story, he is no afterthought, forming part of Flaubert’s original story plan.
In life, Loulou is irritating and socially unpredictable, but adored by Félicité. In death, he becomes a venerated relic. After all, Félicité argues, parrots can prattle away, they are not dumb like doves. Loulou now sits shoulder to shoulder with the Holy Spirit during her daily orisons.
On Félicité’s deathbed, the rapidly disintegrating Loulou finally transcends. With her dying breath, Félicité espies the giant parrot fluttering overhead among the heavenly hosts.
What are we to make of it? In his novel Flaubert’s Parrot, Julian Barnes fleshes out his eponymous feathered hero through the eyes of narrator Geoffrey Braithwaite.
Flaubert, it seems, has previous with parrots. As a boy Flaubert first comes across one on the shoulder of Captain Barbey, a resident of Trouville. However, Braithwaite dismisses that brief encounter as an unlikely genesis for the fully-fledged creature of the 1870s.
Instead, Braithwaite digs out a press cutting of 1863 from among Flaubert’s possession. It tells of a man who teaches his parrot to repeat the name of his lost love. After the parrot dies, the man starts to imitate the parrot in speech and action. Eventually he is found perching in a tree, only coaxed down when offered a man-sized parrot cage.
Flaubert insisted writers should be invisible, distinct from the text. He writes “The artist should make posterity believe he did not exist.” Elsewhere “The artist should imitate God: create and then shut up.”
