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Their final, favourite memory is of a visit to a brothel years before, when they were still schoolboys. They had planned the trip in detail, had their hair specially curled for the occasion, and had even stolen flowers for the girls. But when they got to the brothel, Frédéric lost his nerve, and they both ran away. Such was the best day of their lives. Isn’t the most reliable form of pleasure, Flaubert implies, the pleasure of anticipation?
How do we seize the past? Can we ever do so? When I was a medical student some pranksters at an end-of-term dance released into the hall a piglet which had been smeared with grease. It squirmed between legs, evaded capture, squealed a lot. People fell over trying to grasp it, and were made to look ridiculous in the process. The past often seems to behave like that piglet.
Perhaps it was merely that his body had a sense of decorum: when the mind inside declared itself prematurely old, the flesh did its best to conform.
The final object in Félicité’s ever-diminishing chain of attachments is Loulou, the parrot. When, in due course, he too dies, Félicité has him stuffed. She keeps the adored relic beside her, and even takes to saying her prayers while kneeling before him. A doctrinal confusion develops in her simple mind: she wonders whether the Holy Ghost, conventionally represented as a dove, would not be better portrayed as a parrot. Logic is certainly on her side: parrots and Holy Ghosts can speak, whereas doves cannot. At the end of the story, Félicité herself dies. ‘There was a smile on her lips. The
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Is the writer much more than a sophisticated parrot?
‘Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.’
I replaced the bird and thought: I am now older than Flaubert ever was. It seemed a presumptuous thing to be; sad and unmerited.
‘Happiness is like the pox. Catch it too soon, and it wrecks your constitution.’
‘If I do make an appearance, one day, it will be in full armour.’ Now his breastplate dazzles and his lance is everywhere.
Twenty-five years later: ‘Not a day passes that I don’t think of him.’
Me and my books, in the same apartment: like a gherkin in its vinegar.
When I was still quite young I had a complete presentiment of life. It was like the nauseating smell of cooking escaping from a ventilator: you don’t have to have eaten it to know that it would make you throw up.
Amongst those who go to sea there are the navigators who discover new worlds, adding continents to the earth and stars to the heavens: they are the masters, the great, the eternally splendid. Then there are those who spit terror from their gun-ports, who pillage, who grow rich and fat. Others go off in search of gold and silk under foreign skies. Still others catch salmon for the gourmet or cod for the poor. I am the obscure and patient pearl-fisherman who dives into the deepest waters and comes up with empty hands and a blue face. Some fatal attraction draws me down into the abysses of
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I am only a literary lizard basking the day away beneath the great sun of Beauty. That’s all.
His air of failure had nothing desperate about it; rather, it seemed to stem from an unresented realisation that he was not cut out for success, and his duty was therefore to ensure only that he failed in a correct and acceptable fashion.
Juliet Herbert is a great hole tied together with string.
What a smug, moralising bastard he was. He wore ethics the way tarts wear make-up.
I attract mad people and animals.
What happened to the truth is not recorded.
He finds himself by looking in the works of others.
‘You provide desolation,’ wrote George Sand, ‘and I provide consolation.’ To which Flaubert replied, ‘I cannot change my eyes.’
She was, it seems, a bit fast; though speed, of course, is always exaggerated by those standing still.
People understand a little too quickly the function of the sun. The function of the sun is not to help the cabbages along.
