Sentimental Education (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (3 page)

Flaubert’s most typical posture was of bitter irony. In his correspondence, he admitted that he laughed at everything—facts, people, feelings, and even those matters dearest to his heart, as a method to test them. His sarcasm did not spare current events. In March 1848 he told his mistress Louise Colet:

His mockery denounced all ideological as well as esthetic clichés-all the discourses that speak through us without our control. He compiled a spicy
Dictionnaire des idées reçues
(1913;
Dictionary of Received Ideas).
And his last and unfinished book,
Bouvard et Pecuchet
(1881), an encyclopedic satire of contemporary practices and knowledge, ends up with the two false scholars returning to their original jobs, that of copyists.

Flaubert’s major preoccupation transcended any school; he called it “style,” in the larger sense of artistic creation. Style for him was as much behind the words as in the words, as much the soul as the flesh of a work. It was not contingent on a topic: “There are neither beautiful nor ugly subjects, and one could almost establish as an axiom, if one adopts the point of view of pure Art, that there is no subject at all, style being in itself an absolute way of seeing things.” He toyed with the notion of composing “a book about nothing, a book without any exterior attachment, which would hold together by the internal force of its style, like the earth holds up in the air without being supported; a book that would have almost no topic, or at least whose topic would be almost invisible, if that is possible” (January 1852,
Correspondance,
vol. 2, p. 31).

While Baudelaire searched for the flowers, the beauty of evil, Flaubert assigned himself the task of extracting the beauty of the mediocre, the ordeal of resuscitating ancient Carthage in
Salammbô
(1862), and the challenge of following two idiots, Bouvard and Pecuchet. A recluse in his house at Croisset, in Normandy, like the saints he liked to describe, he experienced the “throes of style”: the anxiety of cutting all banalities, the painful pursuit of the proper word, the trial of oral recitation, and the endless corrections and accumulated drafts. The final manuscript of
Sentimental Education
is 500 pages long, but the first drafts comprise no less than 2,350 sheets written front and back.

 

In 1836, at the age of fifteen, Flaubert, the son of a prestigious surgeon from Rouen, visited the Channel beach at Trouville and met a young lady, Elisa Schlésinger, with whom he fell in love at first sight; the two had a quasi-platonic relationship for many years. Her husband, Maurice Schlésinger, a music publisher in Paris, was an exuberant bon vivant and a womanizer. Such is the anecdotal source of the sentimental—that is, amorous—theme of
Sentimental Education.
In the years following his meeting Elisa, the young and ultra-Romantic Flaubert composed two autobiographical texts:
Memoires d
un fou
(drafted in 1838;
Memoirs of a Madman),
which tells of the narrator’s encounter with the brunette angel Maria, and
Novembre
(drafted in 1842;
November),
in which the same event is followed by the narrator’s move to Paris to study law—Flaubert and later, his fictional character, Frédéric Moreau, did the same—his affair with a married woman, and finally his death as a result of ennui. In 1845, definitively established in Croisset, Flaubert finished a
no
vel entitled
Sentimental Education,
which presents two friends—Jules, the artist dear to the author’s heart, and Henry the climber—who are both in love with a married woman. They prefigure the heroes of the present work, a second and quite different
Sentimental Education,
Moreau and Deslauriers.

Flaubert was in Paris at the onset of the revolution of February 1848. He disapproved both of the popular excesses and of the pitiless repression by the conservatives. He scoffed at the naivete of Lamartine and at the sophisms of Pierre Joseph Proudhon, but was no less disgusted by the vindictive republican Adolphe Thiers and by the opportunists who hailed Bonaparte. In 1849 he left Paris on a journey to Egypt and the Orient in the company of his friend Maxime du Camp (who shared many a trait with Deslauriers). He came back in time to witness the coup of December 2, 1851. Less than two years later he observed in September 1853: “
89 demolished the royalty and the nobility, ’48 the bourgeoisie and ’51 the people. There is
nothing
left, but a crooked and stupid rabble.—We have all sunk into the same level of common mediocrity”
(Correspondance,
vol. 2, p. 437). Yet he too came round to the new regime, and stayed on good terms with the Tuileries court, especially Princess Mathilde, the Emperor’s cousin, until the end of the reign.

Upon his return from Egypt, Flaubert set to work on
Madame
Bovary, which was issued in book form in 1857. In 1862, after a trip to Algeria and Tunisia to visit the ruins of Carthage, he published
Salammbô,
a historical novel that takes place in the third century B.C. The writing of the second
Sentimental Education
lasted from 1864 to 1869, almost until the collapse of the Empire and the upheaval of the Commune, during which Flaubert served in the National Guard. Following the appearance of
Sentimental Education,
Flaubert went back to a manuscript that he had first completed in 1849 but was never satisfied with,
La Tentation de Saint Antoine
(1874;
The Temptation of Saint Anthony).
In 1875 he faced financial ruin while supporting his niece, whom he had raised, and her husband. He published
Trois Contes (Three Stories)
in 1877. And he had almost wrapped up
Bouvard et Pecuchet
when he died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1880. Critics have often noted in Flaubert’s fiction an alternation of narratives set in the realistic here and now and narratives set in a distant space or time: After
Madame Bovary
came the historical novel
Salammbo;
after
Salammbo, Sentimental Education;
then
Saint Anthony
moves into the fantastic mode. Among the tales in
Three Stories,
“Un Coeur simple” (“A Simple Heart”) takes place in contemporary Normandy, while “La Légende de Saint Julien l’Hospitalier” (“The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaler”) and “Hérodias” cultivate the exotic and anachronistic. Finally, the characters Bouvard and Pécuchet bustle around in dangerously close proximity to their public.

This alternation is one symptom of Flaubert’s perpetual uncertainty in regard to his work. As for
Sentimental Education,
he was not sure about the title—a title Marcel Proust would admire later for its “solidity” while noting in it a grammatical indeterminacy. About his book, Flaubert explained:

In October 1867 he confessed to George Sand: “I am afraid the conception is faulty, which is irremediable. Will such flabby characters interest anybody?”
(Correspondance,
vol. 3, p. 697). And in July 1868: “The patriots won’t forgive me this book, nor the reactionaries either! So much the worse: I write things as I feel them—that is, as I believe they exist”
(The Letters of Gustave Flaubert,
translated by Steegmuller, p.116).

Indeed,
Sentimental Education
was unfavorably received by the press. The book was deemed unreadable because of the thinness of plot and the lack of defined personalities of its characters: Was this still a novel? One of the most virulent journalists, the Catholic and Decadent Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, attacked it as a perfect example of Realism, deprived of heroes and panache; others criticized the impassiveness of the narrator in the face of the immorality of his subject. The book was simply a faithful depiction of the times, retorted Taine and Sand. A few years later, the Naturalists, Zola foremost among them, extolled
Sentimental Education
as Flaubert’s masterpiece, precisely for its avoidance of romance and for the impartiality of the author. After Flaubert’s death, Proust and Franz Kafka were equally enthusiastic, but on very different grounds: They liked Flaubert’s style. While Henry James and Jean-Paul Sartre rather preferred
Madame
Bovary, the Nouveaux Romanciers (New Novelists) of the 1960s, led by Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute, saw in this book a forerunner of their own deconstruction of traditional novelistic character, time, structure, and rhetoric.

 

Here is how Karl Marx characterized the atmosphere in France around 1848: “passions without truth, truths without passion; heroes without heroic deeds, history without events; development, whose sole driving force seems to be the calendar, wearying with constant repetition of the same tensions and relaxations”
(The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,
p. 43). On the triple plane of “passions,” “heroes,” and “history,” Marx says the “development” gets bogged down in the reiteration of the same phenomena and gives the impression of going round in circles, implying an enormous loss of energy, an entropy. Flaubert would agree. Circularity and entropy affect the three elements that, following Marx’s suggestion, I will successively examine in Flaubert’s novel: the hero’s evolution, his passions, and France’s turmoil. For
Sentimental Education
is at once an educational novel, a sentimental novel, and a political novel.

The
Story of a Young Man,
as the book is subtitled, is an educational novel, or more specifically a bildungsroman, a subgenre that depicts a generally masculine hero on the threshold of adulthood, whose development results in the acquisition not only of knowledge and skills, but of a certain wisdom. This genre had been popular since the eighteenth century, with the rise of a bourgeoisie that aspired to grow through personal improvement (the nobility only “took the pain of being born,” and the lower classes had no hope to get on in life). Noteworthy examples of the genre include Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s
Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre
(1795-1796;
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship);
Stendhal’s
Le
rouge et le noir (1830; The
Red and the Black);
Balzac’s
Le Père Goriot
(1834;
Father Goriot),
in which Rastignac starts his social climbing through the influence of women; and Charles Dickens’s
Great Expectations
(1860-1861). “Education” presupposes something to learn, several masters or models, a malleable and fecund recepient, a regularity of practice, and unimpeded continuity of time: All these factors are problematic in
Sentimental Education.
Consequently, at the book’s end, no success has been achieved nor experience gained—and yet, contrary to what happens in Balzac’s bildungsroman
Les Illusions perdues
(1837;
Lost Illusions),
Flaubert’s characters, illusions lost, nevertheless endure.

The novel comprises three parts, the first two divided into six chapters each, and the third one into seven. The first part, which starts
in medias res,
covers the span of time from September 1840 to December 1845. It opens with Frédéric Moreau’s return to his hometown of Nogent-sur-Seine and ends with his move to Paris—a necessary step for all provincials who intended to “make it” in France. In Paris, Frédéric hopes to study law, become a writer or an artist, and conquer his sweetheart Madame Arnoux. The second part takes us from December 1845 to the beginning of February 1848; in addition to his debut in life and his sexual initiation, Frédéric also has a political experience, in the ferment preceding the riots. The third part runs from February 1848 to December 2,1851, the date of Bonaparte’s coup: This event puts an end to the protagonist’s political ambitions. The last two chapters form an epilogue; in the first, dated 1867, we witness the unhappy end of Frédéric’s love story with Madame Arnoux; in the second, dated 1869 (the year of the narration), we measure the impasse of his existential trajectory.