puerperal fever. Whether Achille was in attendance is not clear. But the two deaths, coming so close together, greatly affected Flaubert. In a letter, he described sitting up with Caroline’s body while her husband and a priest snored. Just like Emma’s wake. Flaubert remembered those snores. Did he remember the operation performed on his father when he wrote about Charles’ operation on the clubfooted inn boy—the most villainous folly in the book? Or did he fear that Achille remembered and would draw a parallel, where none had been intended? A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must claim to forget. *
On the one hand, Flaubert declared he was Emma. On the other, he wrote to a lady: “There’s nothing in Madame Bovary that’s drawn from life. It’s a completely invented story. None of my own feelings or experiences are in it.” So help him God. Of course, he was fibbing, and contradicting himself as well. Like all novelists, he drew on his own experiences, and, more than most novelists, he was frightened by the need to invent. When he came to do the ball at Vaubyessard, he lamented. “It’s so long since I’ve been to a ball.” If memory failed, he documented himself, as he did for Emma’s school reading, going back over the children’s stories he had read as a little boy and the picture books he had colored. If he had not had an experience the story required, he sought it out. Before writing the chapter about the agricultural fair, he went to one; he consulted his brother about club foot and, disappointed by the ignorance manifest in Achille’s answers, procured textbooks. There is hardly a page in the novel that he had not “lived,” and he constantly drew on his own feelings to render Emma’s.
All novelists do this, but Flaubert went beyond the usual call of duty. Madame Bovary was not Flaubert, certainly; yet he became Madame Bovary and all the accessories to her story, her lovers, her husband, her little greyhound, the corset lace that hissed around her hips like a slithery grass snake as she undressed in the hotel room in Rouen, the blinds of the cab that hid her and Leon as they made love. In a letter he made clear the state of mind in which he wrote. That day he had been doing the scene of the horseback ride, when Rodolphe seduces Emma in the woods. “What a delicious thing writing is—not to be you any more but to move through the whole universe you’re talking about. Take me today, for instance: I was man and woman, lover and mistress; I went riding in a forest on a fall afternoon beneath the yellow leaves, and I was the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words he and she spoke, and the red sun beating on their half-closed eyelids, which were already heavy with passion.” It is hard to imagine another great novelist—Stendhal, Tolstoy, Jane Austen, Dickens, Dostoievsky, Balzac—who would conceive of the act of writing as a rapturous loss of identity. Poets have often expressed the wish for otherness, for fusion—to be their mistress’ sparrow or her girdle or the breeze that caressed her temples and wantoned with her ribbons, but Flaubert was the first to realize this wish in prose, in the disguise of a realistic story. The climax of the horseback ride was, of course, a coupling, in which all of Nature joined in a gigantic, throbbing partouze while Flaubert’s pen flew. He was writing a book, and yet from his account you would think he was reading one. “What a delicious thing reading is—not to be you any more but to flow through the whole universe you’re reading about...” etc., etc.
Compare this, in fact, to the rapt exchange of platitudes between Léon and Emma on the night of their first meeting, at dinner at the Lion d’Or. “‘...is there anything better, really, than sitting by the fire with a book while the wind beats on your window panes and the lamp is burning?’ ‘Isn’t it so?’ she said, fixing him with her large black eyes wide open. ‘One forgets
On the one hand, Flaubert declared he was Emma. On the other, he wrote to a lady: “There’s nothing in Madame Bovary that’s drawn from life. It’s a completely invented story. None of my own feelings or experiences are in it.” So help him God. Of course, he was fibbing, and contradicting himself as well. Like all novelists, he drew on his own experiences, and, more than most novelists, he was frightened by the need to invent. When he came to do the ball at Vaubyessard, he lamented. “It’s so long since I’ve been to a ball.” If memory failed, he documented himself, as he did for Emma’s school reading, going back over the children’s stories he had read as a little boy and the picture books he had colored. If he had not had an experience the story required, he sought it out. Before writing the chapter about the agricultural fair, he went to one; he consulted his brother about club foot and, disappointed by the ignorance manifest in Achille’s answers, procured textbooks. There is hardly a page in the novel that he had not “lived,” and he constantly drew on his own feelings to render Emma’s.
All novelists do this, but Flaubert went beyond the usual call of duty. Madame Bovary was not Flaubert, certainly; yet he became Madame Bovary and all the accessories to her story, her lovers, her husband, her little greyhound, the corset lace that hissed around her hips like a slithery grass snake as she undressed in the hotel room in Rouen, the blinds of the cab that hid her and Leon as they made love. In a letter he made clear the state of mind in which he wrote. That day he had been doing the scene of the horseback ride, when Rodolphe seduces Emma in the woods. “What a delicious thing writing is—not to be you any more but to move through the whole universe you’re talking about. Take me today, for instance: I was man and woman, lover and mistress; I went riding in a forest on a fall afternoon beneath the yellow leaves, and I was the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words he and she spoke, and the red sun beating on their half-closed eyelids, which were already heavy with passion.” It is hard to imagine another great novelist—Stendhal, Tolstoy, Jane Austen, Dickens, Dostoievsky, Balzac—who would conceive of the act of writing as a rapturous loss of identity. Poets have often expressed the wish for otherness, for fusion—to be their mistress’ sparrow or her girdle or the breeze that caressed her temples and wantoned with her ribbons, but Flaubert was the first to realize this wish in prose, in the disguise of a realistic story. The climax of the horseback ride was, of course, a coupling, in which all of Nature joined in a gigantic, throbbing partouze while Flaubert’s pen flew. He was writing a book, and yet from his account you would think he was reading one. “What a delicious thing reading is—not to be you any more but to flow through the whole universe you’re reading about...” etc., etc.
Compare this, in fact, to the rapt exchange of platitudes between Léon and Emma on the night of their first meeting, at dinner at the Lion d’Or. “‘...is there anything better, really, than sitting by the fire with a book while the wind beats on your window panes and the lamp is burning?’ ‘Isn’t it so?’ she said, fixing him with her large black eyes wide open. ‘One forgets
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