Chapter 28 (two)

Gustave Flaubert was born in Rouen in 1821.His father was a doctor who headed a hospital and lived there with his wife and children.This is a happy, respectable and wealthy family.Flaubert was brought up like any other French boy of his class; he went to school, made friends with other boys, read a lot without doing much work.He was emotional and imaginative, and like other children, he was haunted by the loneliness that sensitive people experience all their lives. “I went to school when I was ten,” he wrote, “and I quickly developed an aversion to humans.” It wasn’t a joke, he meant it.From his youth he was a pessimist.It is true that Romanticism was all the rage and pessimism was all the rage: in Flaubert's school a boy blew his brains out and another hung himself with a tie, but we don't really see that Flaubert (who owns A comfortable family, loving parents, a doting sister, a loyal friend) why do they find life unbearable and human beings abominable.

At fifteen, he fell in love.That summer the family went to Trouville (then a small seaside village with only one hotel); there they met the music publisher and adventurer Maurice Schlesinger, his wife and children.It is necessary to paraphrase Flaubert's description of her image: "She is tall, dark-skinned, with beautiful black hair hanging on her shoulders; her nose is square, her eyes are full of passion, her eyebrows are thick and arched Just the right amount of skin radiates like a thin layer of gold; she is slender and elegant, and you can see the veins in her brown-purple throat curve. Also, the fine down on her upper lip is slightly darkened, giving her face a kind of The masculine and powerful demeanor makes the fair-skinned beauties pale in comparison. She speaks very slowly, with a cadence and softness." I really don't want to translate the word pourpre into purple (purple), because it doesn't sound very attractive Man, but that's the translation, I can only think so: Flaubert used the word as a synonym for bright-hued.

Eliza Schlesinger, then twenty-six, was nursing her child.Flaubert was timid and shy, and he would never have had the courage to speak to her if her husband had not been of a jovial, passionate nature, easy to make friends with.Maurice Schlesinger traveled with the boy.Once, the three of them went out to sea in a boat.Flaubert sat side by side with Eliza, shoulder to shoulder, her skirts clung to his hand; she spoke in a low, sweet voice, too, but he was too distracted to remember a word.As the summer ended, the Schlesingers left, the Flauberts returned to Rouen, and Gustave returned to school.A real passion in his life began.Two years later, he returned to Trouville and learned that Eliza had returned but had gone.At this time Flaubert was seventeen years old.To him, his former self seemed too disturbed to really fall in love with her; now his love for her is different, with a male desire, and Yi Ren's absence intensifies his desire.When he got home, he resumed work on his Memoirs of a Madman, a book he had abandoned halfway, in which he recounted the summer he fell in love with Eliza Schlesinger.

At the age of nineteen, as a reward for passing the entrance examination, his father sent him on a trip to the Pyrenees and Corsica with a Dr. Clauguet.At this time, he is mature and broad-shouldered.His contemporaries called him a giant, and he called himself a giant, though he was not quite six feet high, which is hardly tall by today's standards; but the French were much shorter then, and he Among friends, it is obviously a standout.He was thin and elegant, with black lashes shading large sea-green eyes, and beautiful long hair that fell to his shoulders.Forty years later, a woman who knew him as a young man said he was as beautiful as a Greek god.Returning from Corsica, the travelers stopped in Marseilles, and one morning Flaubert, returning from his bath, noticed a young woman sitting in the courtyard of his hotel.Her name was Eulalia Foucault, and she was waiting for the boat to return to her husband, an officer in French Guiana.He greeted each other, and the two struck up a conversation.That night, Flaubert spent with Eulalia Foucault, according to his own account, it was a passionate night, as beautiful as the sunset on the snow.After he left Marseilles, he never saw her again.The experience left a deep impression on him.

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 there, bored with law books, bored with university life; he despised the mediocrity of his fellow students. , affectation, and their bourgeois taste.While in Paris, he wrote a novella called "November", in which he described his love affair with Eulalia Foucault.But he gave her arched eyebrows, an upper lip with pale blue down, and Eliza Schlesinger's lovely neck.He contacted the Schlesingers again while visiting the publisher in his office, and was invited to dinner with them.Eliza was as beautiful as ever.Flaubert, who had been a young man when he last met her, was now an eager, amorous, handsome man.He quickly became acquainted with the couple, often having meals and excursions with them.But he was still as timid as before, and he didn't have the courage to confess his love for a long time.And when he finally confessed, Eliza was not as angry as he feared, but told him clearly that she had no intention of going beyond the boundaries of good friends with him.Her story is very strange.When he first met Eliza in 1836, he, like everyone else, thought she was the wife of Maurice Schlesinger, but she was married to a man named Emile Judea. Man, who got into big trouble for fraud, Schlesinger came forward and offered to save him from prosecution with money on the condition that he leave France and give up his wife.He complied, and Schlesinger lived with Eliza Judea. There was no divorce in France at the time. It was not until Judea died in 1840 that the two were able to marry.It is said that though the poor fellow was no longer around and dead, she still loved him; probably for this reason, plus her devotion to the man (who gave her a home and was the father of her children) , making her reluctant to agree to Flaubert's desire.But he was passionate, and Schlesinger was deeply unfaithful, and perhaps she was moved by Flaubert's boyish admiration; he finally persuaded her to come to his apartment one day; he waited for her impatiently, but she did not come.The above is the story generally accepted by Flaubert's biographers based on what he wrote in , and because it seems plausible, it is likely to be a reliable true account.One thing is certain, Eliza was never his lover.

An event in 1844 thus changed Flaubert's life and, as I shall reveal later, his literary creation.One night, he and his brother had just driven back to Rouen from an estate owned by their mother (which they used to check out).The older brother, who is nine years older, has the same occupation as his father.Suddenly, Flaubert "felt himself unbearably hot, and fell to the ground like a stone at the bottom of a trap".When he came to his senses, he was covered in blood; his brother carried him to a nearby house, bled him, and was sent to Rouen, where his father bled him again and prescribed valerian. Grass and wood, and he was forbidden to smoke, drink or eat meat.For a while, he continued to have seizures.In the days that followed, his broken nerves reached frenzied proportions.There are many mysteries surrounding this condition, and doctors have explored it from different angles.Some people confessed that he had epilepsy, and so did his friends; his niece kept silent about it in her memoirs; The author of this important work, he declared that Flaubert had not epilepsy but what he called "hysterical epilepsy".Regardless of the disease, the treatment was very similar; Flaubert took high doses of quinine sulfate for several years and switched to potassium bromide for the rest of his life.

Perhaps the onset of illness did not come as much of a surprise to Flaubert's family.He is known to have told Maupassant that he had had auditory and visual hallucinations since he was twelve.At the age of nineteen, he was sent on a journey with a doctor, and since the change of scenery was also part of the treatment plan his father later prescribed, it is probable that he was already suffering from epileptic seizures. disease.The Flauberts, rich as they were, were rustic, dull and frugal: it was hard to believe that they would have thought of sending their son on a doctor's trip just because he had passed the exams that schoolchildren in France are required to pass.As a teenager Flaubert felt that he was different from those around him, and his early pessimism was probably caused by this mysterious disease, which must have been affecting his nervous system.In any case, he now faces the fact that he is suffering from a terrible disease whose onset is unpredictable and which necessitates a change in his lifestyle.He decided to renounce the law (presumably voluntarily) and made up his mind never to marry.

In 1845, his father died, and two or three months later his beloved only sister, Caroline, died after giving birth to a daughter.The two had been inseparable since childhood, and she remained his closest friend until his sister married. Sometime before his death, Dr. Flaubert bought an estate called Croisset, a fine two-hundred-year-old stone house on the banks of the Seine, with a front balcony and a small pavilion overlooking the river surface.The doctor's widow lives here with her son Gustave and Caroline's daughter; the eldest son Achille is married and inherits his father's business at the Rouen hospital.Flaubert spent the rest of his life at Croisset.He had been writing on and off since he was very young, and now that he was unable to lead a normal life due to illness, he made up his mind to devote himself entirely to literary creation.He had a studio on the ground floor with windows facing the Seine and the garden.His living habits are very organized. He gets up at about ten o'clock, reads letters and newspapers, has a simple lunch at eleven o'clock, and then takes a walk on the balcony or sits in the pavilion and reads until one o'clock.At this point he began to work in earnest until supper at seven o'clock, then went for a walk in the garden, and returned to work until night.Except for a few friends, he never saw anyone, and these friends were also invited by him occasionally to discuss his works with him.There were three in total: Alfred le Poitévin, who was older than Flaubert and was a family friend; Maxime Ducamp, whom he had met while studying law in Paris; Boyer, who earned a modest income by teaching Latin and French in Rouen.They both loved literature, and Boyer was a poet himself.Flaubert was gentle and loyal to his friends, but he was possessive and demanding.When Le Poiteven (who had greatly influenced Flaubert) married a Mademoiselle de Maupassant, he was furious. "It shocked me," he said later, "as a scandal caused by a bishop shocks the faithful." About Maxime Ducam and Louis Boyet, I will do it later introduce.

When Caroline died, Flaubert made molds for her face and hands. A few months later, he went to Paris to find Palladi, a very famous sculptor at the time, and asked him to make a statue of Caroline.In Paradir's studio, he met a poetess named Louise Collet.She was one of those writers not uncommon among men of letters who think that enthusiasm alone is a sufficient substitute for talent.By virtue of her beauty, she won a place in the literary world.She opened a salon, frequented by elites, called "Muse".Her husband, Hippolyte Colet, was a professor of music; her lover, Victor Cousin, by whom she bore a child, was a philosopher and statesman.Her blond curls set off the shape of her face, and her voice was affectionate and soft.She only admitted that she was thirty years old, but she was actually several years older. Flaubert was twenty-five at the time.Forty-eight hours later, by a little accident (due to his nervous excitement), he became her lover, and certainly did not replace the philosopher, who, according to her statement, was Plato at the time. Formal, but formal; three days later, after a tearful farewell to Louise, he returned to Croisset.That same night he wrote to Louise the first in a series of love letters, letters to lovers of the utmost eccentricity.Years later, he told Edmond de Goncourt that he had loved Louise Collet "fiercely"; but he was a man who tended to exaggerate the facts, and the contents of his letters hardly substantiate this statement.I think we may well surmise that he was proud of having a public lover; but he lived a life of fantasy, and, like so many visionaries, his love for his lover, when parted, Stronger than when we were together.Slightly redundant, he told her the truth.She urged him to come and live in Paris quickly; he told her that he could not leave his bereaved mother; so she begged him to come to Paris at least more often; She couldn't leave, so she replied angrily: "So you are being watched like a little girl?" In fact, she was right.His seizures would leave him debilitated and depressed for days, and his mother was naturally concerned.She wouldn't let him swim in the river (which was his hobby), or row a boat on the Seine unattended.As long as he rang the bell and asked the servant to deliver what he wanted, his mother would rush upstairs to see if he was all right.He told Louise that she would not object if he offered to leave her for a few days, but he could not bear the grief it caused her.Louise could not fail to see that if he really loved himself as much as he loved him, it would not prevent him from meeting her.Even then, it was not difficult to come up with plausible excuses to justify having to go to Paris.He was still very young, and if he agreed to wait so long to see Louise, it was probably because his sex drive was not urgent (he was often under the influence of strong painkillers).

"Your love is not love at all," Louise wrote, "and in any case love is not important in your life." To which he replied: "You want to know if I love you. Well Well, yes, I love you as much as I can; that is to say, in my opinion, love is not the first in life, but the second." Flaubert was very proud of his frankness, but in fact he was very happy. cruel.Once, he actually asked Louise to inquire about the whereabouts of Eulalia Foucault from a friend who lived in Cayenne, and Foucault was his target in Marseilles, and even asked her to send a letter to her; He also made no secret of his astonishment when he angrily accepted the mission.He even told her about his encounters with prostitutes, whom, according to his story, he liked and often flattered himself about.But nothing men lie about more than their sex life, and he's probably bragging about sexual abilities he doesn't even have.On one occasion, unable to resist her stubbornness, he proposed to meet at a hotel in Mantis, as long as she left Paris early and he came from Rouen, they could spend an afternoon together, and he could still spend an afternoon in Paris. Get home before dark.To his surprise, this proposal made her very angry.They met a total of six times during the two years of the relationship, which she apparently broke off.

Meanwhile, Flaubert was busy writing a book he had been planning for a long time; it was arranged that he would travel to the Near East with Maxime Ducamp as soon as it was finished.Mrs. Flaubert agreed, because her son Ashley and Dr. Crowgue (the same doctor who had accompanied Flaubert to Corsica many years ago) said that a short stay in a warm country would be good for his health. .When the manuscript was finished, Flaubert summoned Ducam and Boyet to Croisset with the intention of reading it to them.He read for four full days, four hours in the afternoon and four hours in the evening.They discussed it, and they will not express their opinions until they have listened to the entire work.On the night of the fourth day, Flaubert, who was at the end of the reading, slammed his fist on the table and said, "How is it?" One of them replied, "We think you should throw it in the fire and stop talking about it." .” It was a fatal blow.They argued for hours, and Flaubert finally accepted their opinion.Then Boyer suggested that since Flaubert took Balzac as an example, he should write a realistic novel.It was already eight o'clock, and they went to bed.Later in the day they met again to continue the discussion, and it was then, according to Maxime Ducamp in his Literary Memoirs, that Boyer came up with the story of what eventually became; but before Flaubert and In the travels that Diacon then embarked on, Flaubert wrote home many of the novel subjects he was thinking about, but did not, so it is safe to say that Daacon was mistaken.The two friends went to Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Greece successively.They returned to Paris in 1815.Flaubert still hadn't decided what to write, and it was probably at that time that Boyer told him the story of Eugène Drama.Delama was a trainee physician, a resident physician or surgeon at a hospital in Rouen, and also practiced medicine in a nearby town.The first wife was a widow much older than himself, and he had just married the young and beautiful daughter of a neighboring farmer.Pretentious and extravagant, she soon grew bored with her boring husband and took several lovers.She didn't think about her ability to pay, and spent a lot of money on clothes, so she was in debt.In the end she took poison and Drama also committed suicide.We all know that Flaubert was very concerned with this ordinary little story. Not long after his return to France, he met Louise Collet again.While he was away, things were going badly for her.Her husband died, and Victor Cousin no longer funded her, and no one accepted her script.So she wrote to Flaubert that she would pass through Rouen on her return from England; they met and resumed their correspondence.Soon he went to Paris and became her lover again.People don't understand why.She was in her forties at this time, with blond hair and blue eyes, and blond women are often not anti-ageing, and women who claimed to be elegant at that time did not wear makeup.Maybe he was touched by her feelings for him, she was the only woman who had ever loved him after all, maybe he had been sexually insecure and the few times he had sex with her he felt at ease.Her letters were destroyed, but his was still there.From these letters, we can see that Louise has not improved: she is still as domineering, harsh, and annoying as she was at the beginning.Her letters grew bitter.She continued to urge Flaubert to come to Paris, or herself to Croisset; and he still made excuses for not going and for letting her come.His letters deal mainly with literary themes, and the emotion at the end is perfunctory; what is interesting about them is mainly the difficult progress he talks about, when all his energies were devoted to the book.Every now and then Louise wrote a poem and sent it to Flaubert.His criticism was harsh.The relationship between the two inevitably came to an end.It was also due to the sloppyness of Louise herself.Victor Cousin offered to marry her, as if for her daughter's sake, and she seemed to let Flaubert know that it was because of him that she rejected him.In fact, she had made up her mind to marry Flaubert, but accidentally told her friends about her thoughts.He was dumbfounded when the news reached his ears, and after a series of violent altercations that left him shocked and humiliated, he told her that he never wanted to see her again.But she was not intimidated, and one day there was another scene at Croisset, and he threw her out with a cruelty that even his mother could not stand.Although women have always stubbornly believed in their own wishful thinking, the "muse" finally accepted the fact that Flaubert had broken with herself forever.Her revenge was to write a novel (reportedly poorly written) in which he was portrayed as a villain.