Bonnets and Bayonets

Flaubert’s​ L’Éducation sentimentale (1869) is rightly celebrated as a masterwork of literary realism, but it also, quite consistently, makes us wonder whether we know what realism is, or what else might be caught up in it. One of the novel’s characters, a painter, thinks the very concept is ridiculous: ‘Down with Realism! A painter needs to paint the spirit!’ It’s true that this character, a man called Pellerin, later becomes a photographer, a gesture we are invited to see as the entire defeat of everything he used to stand for.

Perhaps the idea of irony will help us here. The novel itself, again, has its comments on the topic. The chief character, Frédéric Moreau, repeats a friend’s evasive question about wealthy people like himself (‘Is it their fault?’) ‘with a haughty Ciceronian irony that sounded like it came straight from the law court’. In a different context he tries ‘attacking via irony’. Another character, Mme Dambreuse, a widow whom Frédéric almost marries, has a ‘meaningful smile, both polite and ironic at once’ and utters sentences that ‘could pass for acts of deference or for ironies’. There is a quiet invitation to the reader in these lines. If we miss the book’s ironies, we shall miss most of it. But the phrases also abandon us before we know where we are.

Flaubert wrote of his interest in comic material that ‘arrives at the extreme, that doesn’t make us laugh, the lyrical moment in the joke’ as what he most wanted to treat as a writer, ‘ce qui me fait le plus envie comme écrivain’. This wish kept coming to mind in my most recent reading of L’Éducation sentimentale, even if it only enhanced my bewilderment. On earlier readings I hadn’t fully registered the persistence of comedy-based narrative structures, of what we could think of as the Charlie Chaplin or Jacques Tati version of action. This is a serious novel about French life in and around the revolution of 1848, a history as well as a story, to echo the double meaning of its subtitle (Histoire d’un jeune homme), but its narrative logic is that of slapstick. If something can go wrong, it will: perfectly, symphonically. When Frédéric returns to Paris after a short absence, everyone he knows seems to have moved house and changed jobs, so he can’t find any of them. We chase desperately up and down the streets with him. Just as he is about to marry the rich Mme Dambreuse, he discovers she is broke. His most elaborate attempt at having a night together with Mme Arnoux, whom he thinks of as the real love of his life, fails because her child falls ill and she can’t leave home.

There is much more of this kind of thing, and the novel ends with a sort of fable, discreetly foreshadowed in the first pages of the book. Frédéric and a friend, when young, visited a brothel in their native town, but they were not able to enjoy its pleasures because Frédéric got scared and ran off. His friend had to leave, too, because Frédéric had the money. The last words of the novel describe a late conversation between the two now quite elderly men:

They told the story together all over again, and at great length, each one supplying details the other had forgotten; and, when they were done:

‘That was the best time of our lives!’ said Frédéric.

‘Yes, you know, I think you might be right? That was the best time of our lives!’ said Deslauriers.

There is no doubt of the success of the effect, this slapstick without ridicule, but how has Flaubert managed, throughout the book, to keep us from laughing? Of course, there are plenty of places where laughter is actually invited. But many key moments have this strange structure of comedy as a form of misery. Are Frédéric and Deslauriers being ironic? Are they right about their lives even if they imagine they are not? Is their memory a cover-up for everything they don’t want to think about? Are they and Flaubert conspiring to exclude a genuine reflection on their lives? Do we have anything like an access to the author’s views on all this? Or the narrator’s?

A look at some of the techniques of the novel will get us closer to what is going on. First, there is a diligent detailed realism, essential in spite of whatever Pellerin may say. Time, place, action, clothes, food, dialogue and much more are reported – recreated – with impeccable, mildly obsessive care. Second, this approach is frequently, subtly invaded by moments of subjectivity or impressionism: we are seeing not what an observer would see but what the characters see. And, the third technique, a phrase or two suddenly makes us wonder who is talking and who the reader is supposed to be.

The opening displays all three techniques beautifully:

On 15 September 1840, at just about six in the morning, great swirling clouds of smoke were puffing up out of the Ville-de-Montereau, docked but nearly ready to shove off from the quai Saint-Bernard.

People were rushing up out of breath; barrels, cables, baskets filled with linens all made it hard to get around.

Then the boat takes off and the gaze changes: ‘the riverbanks on either side, dotted with shops, workshops and factories, slid past, unspooling like a pair of ribbons.’ In the next paragraph we see ‘Paris disappearing altogether from view’ and right after that our hero, previously described as ‘a young man, eighteen years old, with long hair’, is now named as M. Frédéric Moreau, as if he needed a formal presentation. Does the narrator think the page is a drawing room or a show?

There is something both cool and dizzying about this sequence, and versions of it occur again and again in the novel. The book turns to the streets and palaces of Paris in the early moments of the revolution.

Suddenly the ‘Marseillaise’ broke out … The People had arrived. They swarmed up over the staircases in a dizzying flood of bare heads, caps, red bonnets, bayonets and shoulders, surging so impetuously that people disappeared in the teeming mass, which kept on ascending, like a springtime tide that pushes back a river, an irresistible force with a deep roar …

Then a frantic joy broke out, as if there, in the place where the throne had been, a future of unlimited happiness had just appeared; and the people, not so much out of vengeance as out of a need to affirm their ownership, began to break and shatter and tear to pieces the windows, curtains, chandeliers, candelabra, the tables, chairs, stools, all the furniture right down to the albums of drawings and the needlework baskets. When you’ve won, you might as well have fun!

‘The People’ seems openly ironic but may not be. The ideas of joy and fun are loaded interpretations of a mood, but the mood is catching even if the narrator doesn’t share it. There is a sort of sneer in the later suggestion that although ‘Frédéric was no warrior, the Gallic blood within him was aroused,’ but we don’t have to join in the sneering. The mood soon changes anyway, and the narrator treats us to a marvellous sentence where realism vanishes, and political commentary takes its place:

Despite the most humane legislation ever passed, the spectre of 1793 kept reappearing, and the chopping sound of the guillotine could be heard in every syllable of the word ‘republic’ … France, finding itself without a master, took to crying in terror, like a blind man who’s lost his cane, or a child who’s lost his nursemaid.

But this may or may not be the view of either Flaubert or his narrator. All we have on the page is a paraphrase of what a certain group of people thinks.

These effects – these combinations of reporting, animation and parody – are even more strongly at work in accounts of the private lives of the characters. Frédéric makes gestures or has thoughts that may or may not enact verdicts against him. When he is feeling generous, he looks around for someone he might help. He doesn’t find anyone – but that’s not a problem, since ‘he was not the sort of man who would go out of his way looking for any such opportunity.’ We also read that ‘he felt as if he were being tortured, and he cursed his own youth’ and ‘it seemed to him that the happiness the excellence of his soul deserved was a little tardy in arriving.’ And my favourite: ‘this catastrophe … opened up and revealed the secret wealth of his character’ (literally, ‘the secret opulences of his nature’).

Some of these analyses are less focused on the individual, more philosophical. ‘Everyone’s conscience has absorbed something from the stream of sophistry that’s been poured into it.’ And: ‘Most of the men there had served under at least four different governments, and they would have sold out France or even the whole human race to protect their own fortunes, to spare themselves the least discomfort or difficulty, or simply out of sheer baseness, out of their instinctive worship of Power.’ The literal term here is a ‘force’, ‘adoration instinctive de la force’, which is perhaps a bit scarier. A similar claim is made more briefly about a character who ‘would have paid for the privilege of selling himself’.

And then realism itself can seem to comment on the frenzy of the characters. Frédéric is rushing to see someone and passes an old man crying in a window, while ‘the Seine flowed peacefully on its way. The sky was a perfect blue; in the trees of the Tuileries, birds were singing.’ Elsewhere, a young woman cries too, and we are told that ‘day was breaking, and some wagons were driving by.’ And on one extraordinary occasion, the real world doesn’t comment or go on its way: it stops in its tracks. Frédéric is happy for once, and ‘the tall trees out in the garden that, till now, had been rustling gently in the wind suddenly stood still. Clouds too were motionless, long, red streaks in the sky, and it was as if all things everywhere were suspended in silence.’ The syntax of realism also works for real illusions.

Finally, I think, we do get a sort of view of Flaubert the writer across all the ambiguities and sarcasms. The best open indication of this is the dry, delicate use of language actually flirting with laughter: the old man who is ‘médiocrement aimable’ (‘minimally amiable’); Frédéric feeling ‘voluptueusement stupide’ (‘in a voluptuous stupor’). At one point there is a ‘homicidal’ smile; elsewhere an ‘ineffable’ one. We get the impression that Flaubert, like Kafka, thinks or knows that the human world is ridiculous or monstrous. Sometimes he is angry about this, but more often the writing suggests a complicated sympathy. There are no saints or heroes, even if Flaubert wrote a novel about St Anthony. And none of us is qualified to feel superior to anyone else. If we haven’t committed any idiocies yet, we soon will, individually and collectively. A sort of desolate democracy.

In a much quoted letter, Flaubert wrote words that became a major motto of modernism. ‘Authors in their work,’ he said, ‘must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.’ They may also be specialists in the laughable, even if they mostly can’t bring themselves to laugh that much. After his remark about the comic element, Flaubert cited Molière’s Malade imaginaire as going deeper in interior worlds than any Greek play, ‘tous les Agamemnons’.

Raymond MacKenzie’s translation is excellent, and if I have occasionally resorted to the French phrasing it is to suggest something of the attractions of thinking about other roads while having a good time on the one we have chosen. Differences between languages are not a problem: they are an invitation to travel. Without moving beyond the pages of this novel we can think about what it means for French to have only one word for both ‘history’ and ‘story’, or for ‘sentimental’ in French to have none of the soggy meanings it often has in English. The work is full of a French usage that has an exact equivalent in some other languages, but nothing like the life Flaubert lends to it. I’m thinking of the personal pronoun ‘on’, ‘one’. It is everywhere, taking up most of the space ‘he’ or ‘she’ or ‘you’ or ‘we’ or ‘they’ would usually occupy. There are 21 such uses in the first chapter. The practice also takes us back to Flaubert’s ambiguities, since he seems to be deliberately pulling down the blinds, appealing to the clichés we all have littering our heads.

An early appearance of the usage is flanked by other ways of avoiding precision, by exactly the reverse of detailed realism. We are looking at, listening to, the travellers on the boat of the early pages. ‘Beaucoup chantaient. On était gai. Il se versait des petits verres.’ MacKenzie alters the word order and neatly catches the feeling of anonymity: ‘Many were singing. They treated themselves to drinks. The good cheer was contagious.’

Other translators have provided comparable versions: ‘A good many began singing. Spirits rose. Glasses were brought out and filled’ (Robert Baldick, 1964); ‘Many sang songs. They were jolly together. They offered one another a drop to drink’ (Helen Constantine, 2016); ‘Many sang. Spirits rose, and glasses were produced and filled’ (Anthony Goldsmith, 1947); ‘There was singing and gaiety, drinks were being poured’ (Perdita Burlingame, 1972); ‘There was a good deal of singing. People were in high spirits. All around, glasses were being filled’ (Douglas Parmée, 1989). One doesn’t see ‘one’ among the options. The other uses in the chapter, to half-translate them crudely, are: ‘one ran into each other’, ‘one unfolds’; ‘one met’, ‘one could’, ‘one found again’, ‘one had’, ‘one heard’, ‘one pardoned’, ‘one saw’, ‘one perceived’, ‘one discovered’, ‘one went along’, ‘one arrived’, ‘one would have given’, ‘one waited’, ‘one consulted’, ‘one kissed’, ‘one made’, ‘one spoke’, ‘one withdrew’. For these, MacKenzie offers passive verb forms, several ‘theys’, a ‘you’, ‘people’, ‘everyone’, phrases such as ‘came into view’ and ‘the eye’. We could guess that the French language as used by Flaubert has a special interest in keeping active agents out of the picture, and that ‘one’ is a comfortable collective that protects its members. The feeling we get, I think, is that ‘we’, nudged into being ‘one’, are comically predictable, not even dreaming of a laugh. I’m not sure how we defend ourselves against the implied charge.