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57
FLAUBERT Gustave (1821-1880).
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FLAUBERT Gustave (1821-1880).
L.A.S. "your G.", [Croisset] Tuesday night [14 June 1853], to Louise
COLET| 4 pages in-4, envelope with postmarks and red wax seal annotated by Louise Colet.
Long and magnificent letter on the progress of Madame Bovary, from which Flaubert quotes a passage.
Feeling this morning in a great mood for style, I grabbed my Bovary after my geography lesson to my niece and sketched three pages in the afternoon - which I have just rewritten this evening. The movement is furious & full of it. - I will no doubt discover a thousand repetitions of words that must be removed. [...] What a miracle it would be for me to write now only two pages in a day, I who hardly do three a week! He thinks that in a fortnight he will be able to "read to Bouilhet this whole beginning (120 pages). - If it goes well, it will be a great encouragement, and I will have passed, if not the most difficult, at least the most boring. But what delays! I am not yet at the point where I thought I would be for our last meeting in Mantes.
Then he evokes the "silly and violent worries" of his "poor dear friend", who is in the grip of a former lover, Octave LACROIX, SAINTEBEUVE's secretary: "On such shit that comes to rest at our feet, the best thing he can do is to pass the sponge straight away and not think about it any more. Flaubert is ready to go and give them "something on the face or somewhere else [...] What's the use of discussing, replying, getting passionate? [...] It's always this damned element of passion that causes us all our troubles.
[...] Yes, you have to restrain your heart - keep it on a leash like a rabid bulldog - and then let it loose in style, - at the right moment. Run, old man, run, bark loudly & take to the belly"...
He reassures Louise about her poem La Paysanne (published at the beginning of the year): "You are surprised to be the target of so much slander, attacks, indifference and ill will. The better you do, the more you will get. That is the reward of the good and the beautiful. One can calculate the value of a man by the number of his enemies, and the importance of a work by the evil that is said about it. - Critics are like fleas, who always jump on white linen, and adore lace"...
Flaubert reports the amusing remarks of a Trouville priest during a lavish dinner, and he quotes a dialogue between Charles Bovary and the pharmacist Homais: "- Come on!" said the pharmacist, raising his shoulders, "the parties at the caterer's! the masked balls! the champagne! all that will roll off, I assure you! - I don't think he'll mind," objected Bovary. - I don't think he'll bother," said Mr. Homais, "but he'll have to follow the others, at the risk of looking like a Jesuit - and you don't know what kind of life these jokers lead in the Latin Quarter with actresses! Besides, students are very well regarded in Paris. If they have any talent for pleasure, they are received in the best society| and there are even ladies of the faubourg
St Germain, who become enamoured of them - which gives them the opportunity, afterwards, to make very beautiful marriages. In two pages I have put together, I think, all the nonsense that is said in the provinces about
Paris. - The life of a student, the actresses, the tricksters who approach you in public gardens, & the restaurant cuisine "always more unhealthy than the bourgeois cuisine".
He recounts the funeral of Madame Pouchet: "The grotesque deafened my ears
- knows and the pathetic convulsed before my eyes. From which I draw (or rather withdraw) this conclusion - one should never fear being exaggerated - all the great ones have been, Michelangelo Rabelais Shakespeare, Molière [...] But for exaggeration not to appear, it must be everywhere - continuous, proportionate, harmonious to itself. If your men are a hundred feet tall, the mountains must be twenty thousand. - & what is the ideal if not this magnification?"...
Correspondence (Pléiade), t. II, p.353.
L.A.S. "your G.", [Croisset] Tuesday night [14 June 1853], to Louise
COLET| 4 pages in-4, envelope with postmarks and red wax seal annotated by Louise Colet.
Long and magnificent letter on the progress of Madame Bovary, from which Flaubert quotes a passage.
Feeling this morning in a great mood for style, I grabbed my Bovary after my geography lesson to my niece and sketched three pages in the afternoon - which I have just rewritten this evening. The movement is furious & full of it. - I will no doubt discover a thousand repetitions of words that must be removed. [...] What a miracle it would be for me to write now only two pages in a day, I who hardly do three a week! He thinks that in a fortnight he will be able to "read to Bouilhet this whole beginning (120 pages). - If it goes well, it will be a great encouragement, and I will have passed, if not the most difficult, at least the most boring. But what delays! I am not yet at the point where I thought I would be for our last meeting in Mantes.
Then he evokes the "silly and violent worries" of his "poor dear friend", who is in the grip of a former lover, Octave LACROIX, SAINTEBEUVE's secretary: "On such shit that comes to rest at our feet, the best thing he can do is to pass the sponge straight away and not think about it any more. Flaubert is ready to go and give them "something on the face or somewhere else [...] What's the use of discussing, replying, getting passionate? [...] It's always this damned element of passion that causes us all our troubles.
[...] Yes, you have to restrain your heart - keep it on a leash like a rabid bulldog - and then let it loose in style, - at the right moment. Run, old man, run, bark loudly & take to the belly"...
He reassures Louise about her poem La Paysanne (published at the beginning of the year): "You are surprised to be the target of so much slander, attacks, indifference and ill will. The better you do, the more you will get. That is the reward of the good and the beautiful. One can calculate the value of a man by the number of his enemies, and the importance of a work by the evil that is said about it. - Critics are like fleas, who always jump on white linen, and adore lace"...
Flaubert reports the amusing remarks of a Trouville priest during a lavish dinner, and he quotes a dialogue between Charles Bovary and the pharmacist Homais: "- Come on!" said the pharmacist, raising his shoulders, "the parties at the caterer's! the masked balls! the champagne! all that will roll off, I assure you! - I don't think he'll mind," objected Bovary. - I don't think he'll bother," said Mr. Homais, "but he'll have to follow the others, at the risk of looking like a Jesuit - and you don't know what kind of life these jokers lead in the Latin Quarter with actresses! Besides, students are very well regarded in Paris. If they have any talent for pleasure, they are received in the best society| and there are even ladies of the faubourg
St Germain, who become enamoured of them - which gives them the opportunity, afterwards, to make very beautiful marriages. In two pages I have put together, I think, all the nonsense that is said in the provinces about
Paris. - The life of a student, the actresses, the tricksters who approach you in public gardens, & the restaurant cuisine "always more unhealthy than the bourgeois cuisine".
He recounts the funeral of Madame Pouchet: "The grotesque deafened my ears
- knows and the pathetic convulsed before my eyes. From which I draw (or rather withdraw) this conclusion - one should never fear being exaggerated - all the great ones have been, Michelangelo Rabelais Shakespeare, Molière [...] But for exaggeration not to appear, it must be everywhere - continuous, proportionate, harmonious to itself. If your men are a hundred feet tall, the mountains must be twenty thousand. - & what is the ideal if not this magnification?"...
Correspondence (Pléiade), t. II, p.353.