Sentimental Education (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (4 page)

As Flaubert was well aware, the unfolding of narrative time provides no plot advancement, no character development, no building of effect. Frédéric’s career, which suffers from “not having kept to a ready course” (p. 477), is like a journey that goes nowhere. In the introductory chapter, the young man embarks on a boat trip back home to his mother and his high-school friend Deslauriers, in a regressive move up the Seine from Paris to Nogent; in the second-to-last chapter, he wanders, over the course of a few lines, through exotic places before coming back, a little more blase, to his point of departure. In between these two expeditions, he roams endlessly in the capital, to the rhythm of his mediocre law studies, diminishing fortune, and abandoned ideas and aborted projects. Circularity and entropy frame his whole biography. At the beginning, he “found that the happiness that he deserved by virtue of his sensitive soul was slow in coming” (p. 6); at the end, “he endured the idleness of his intelligence and the inertia of his heart” (p. 469). In the concluding words of the book, Frédéric and Deslauriers evoke, in 1869, the memory of a visit they took as boys to a Nogent bordello in 1837, three years before the start of the story, which at the time proved a fiasco and a scandal: “That was the best we ever got!” (p. 479). Ultimately, the “best” amounts to a miserable episode the account of which appears only as an afterthought in the novel.

The problem is not just that time has passed, but that the two comrades are older and disenchanted: Time has constantly slipped out of their grasp. Their conversation in the epilogue offers a sobering echo of their optimistic exchanges at the outset of their existences and of the book.

The dynamism of the former and the musing of the latter will prove equally useless. Deslauriers, the social climber with leftist leanings, petit-bourgeois manners, naive arrogance, and little money, will not live up to the “laurels”
(lauriers)
promised by his name; he will not rise “by a series of actions deducing themselves from one another” (p. 90), as occurs in the hyperactive universe of
The Human Comedy;
he will never launch one of those newspapers that, as Balzac in Lost
Illusions
and later Maupassant in
Bel-Ami
(1885) have shown, constitute a new and unstoppable force in bourgeois society. Frédéric, for his part, hesitates between professions, artistic pursuits, and opinions. He studies without motivation and makes a living through an inherited income. When he considers presenting himself as a candidate for the legislative elections, it is too late. When, like Goethe’s Werther, Chateaubriand’s René, and even Madame Bovary, he attempts suicide, the bridge parapet proves too wide. His dream-already somewhat out of fashion in the 1840s—was to become the French Walter Scott. But the narrative relating “How Messire Brokars de Fenestranges and the Bishop of Troyes attacked Messire Eustache d’Ambrecicourt” (p. 477) is forever torn between the past (the Middles Ages inspired by the fourteenth-century chronicler Jean Froissart) and the future (the perpetual postponement of the task of writing). Unlike Lucien de Rubempré in Lost Illusions, Frédéric does not produce a historical novel. And the romance he envisions—a series of wonderful adventures set in Venice, which would transpose his great love—discourages him by its triteness.

In their youth, Charles Deslauriers, a little older than his friend and a bit imperious by nature, poses as Frédéric’s master. He ends up being more like his double, a double oscillating between sensual intimacy, economic parasitism, and erotic rivalry. Frédéric imagines that “a man of this sort was worth all the women in the world” (p. 50). Deslauriers is sensitive to his comrade’s “quasi-feminine charm,” and they plan to share their existence. But their social status stands in the way: Deslauriers lives off his roommate, while the latter prefers to pay Arnoux’s debts rather than help found a newspaper. Competition prevails in relation to women: Deslauriers becomes an adviser to Madame Dambreuse, tries to seduce Madame Arnoux, tastes Rosanette’s charms, and finally supplants Frédéric in marrying Louise Roque in Nogent. Yet friendship—an important element in Flaubert’s own life—survives the two characters’ rifts and their long separation. When they are reunited in the last pages, Frédéric has squandered most of his fortune and lives as a petit-bourgeois; whatever wisdom this “man prone to every foible” (p. 336) has gleaned is negative: to not trust people, to not believe in ideas, to stay away from politics. Deslauriers has followed a more scattered and declining trajectory: He has renounced his former convictions and fallen from a prefect to a secretary of a pasha to a publicist and petty employee. Betrayed by Louise, he remains alone, like Frédéric. But then, all the characters who achieve success are despicable, most of all Baptiste Martinon, a fellow student of peasant origin and pliable character, who weds the banker Dambreuse’s illegitimate daughter and is promoted to senator under the Empire. Humbled, isolated, and yet lucid, the two aging friends are not that far from the satirical pair of Bouvard and Pécuchet.

 

In his sentimental novel, Frédéric fluctuates among four women: a Romantic idol, a well-endowed heiress, an upper-class socialite, and a prostitute. He courts one for lack of the other, is loved by one while thinking of another—and lets them all escape. Significantly, Madame Arnoux, the idol, occupies the beginning and the end of the text. The second in order of appearance, and the last but one to disappear, is heiress Louise Roque, the provincial neighbor who at first seems unacceptable because of her father’s questionable morals, but then is highly desirable because of her father’s fortune; the only one candidly to confess her love for Frédéric, Louise nevertheless marries Deslauriers, before running off with yet another man. Further along in the plot appear two courtesans: Rosanette, a professional, and the socialite Madame Dambreuse, who hides behind a sham respectability and proves less difficult to conquer than the prostitute; the frivolous Rosanette takes on Fr6d6ric’s sexual education, while the greedy, cold-hearted, and well-connected Madame Dambreuse should insure Frédéric’s worldly success. In the end, he sacrifices them both to Madame Arnoux’s memory.

Madame Arnoux’s first name is Marie, the name of the Virgin Mother. The theme of the young man in love with a maternal figure, often with children of her own, who provides him with both a sentimental and a social education, appeared in the eighteenth century and is not rare in Romantic literature—one thinks of Stendhal’s
The Red and the Black,
Balzac’s
Le Lys dans la Vállée
(1836;
The Lily in the halley),
or Charles Sainte-Beuve’s
Volupté
(1834;
Sensual Pleasure).
In all these novels, the older woman is in competition with one or several younger females, and her child’s disease holds her back from adulterous, and symbolically incestuous, temptation. In our text as in those, Marie is the object of the deepest, and the most forbidden, desire. When Frédéric meets her on the boat on his way back to Madame Moreau’s, she sits like a Madonna with child; in the epilogue, she kisses him “on the forehead, like a mother” (p. 474). No one may emulate her in that role: Whereas her maternity is sublime—as when she sacrifices her first and only rendezvous with Frédéric to look after her sick child, and the child survives—Rosanette’s unwanted maternity, which she uses to retain Frédéric, is slightly grotesque, and her baby dies.

Starting with the initial “apparition” of the Beloved on the boat, the sentimental novel recycles the clichés of courtly and Romantic love. This love, however, entails neither chivalric prowess nor grandiose despair, not even suicide, as in the case of Madame Bovary. Madame Arnoux resembles “the women of whom he had read in romances” (p. 13)—but bears the prosaic patronymic of Arnoux, a name that sounds like that of the famous demimondaine Sophie Arnould. She looks wonderfully Andalusian, but she is from Chartres, not far from Paris. She represents an ethereal figure, but she is soiled by money problems and conjugal squabbles. She becomes the “center” of Frédéric’s existence; the Paris of his perambulations, his daily occupations, the people he frequents—everything revolves around her. For her sake he arranges his attire, his apartments, his activities. For her sake he associates with her husband and his vulgar acquaintances, squandering his financial resources. He projects her image everywhere: “All women brought her to mind, either from the effect of their resemblance to her or by the violent contrast” (p. 78). Frédéric stands in ecstasy before a lighted window—but it is not hers! He elaborates words, gestures, scenarios—which do not come to pass. When, while being posted to the National Guard in 1848 at the same time as Jacques Arnoux, he fathomed that the sleeping Arnoux could be disposed of by an accidental bullet, “images passed through his mind in endless succession. He saw himself with her at night in a coach, then on a river’s bank on a summer’s evening, and under the reflection of a lamp at home in their own house.... Frédéric brooded over this idea like a playwright in the creative act” (p. 354). But whereas Madame Bovary was poisoned by books before poisoning herself with arsenic, Madame Arnoux “did not display much enthusiasm about literature” (p. 163). What she represents is, in fact, a vacuous center, around which the mesmerized suitor turns in vain. The final formula of the sentimental novel is “we will have loved each other so much” (p. 471)—a phrase in the future perfect tense in which the present of love has evaporated in the conjunction of posteriority and anteriority, expectation, and nostalgia. Here too, circularity and entropy dominate.

In the second to last chapter, which can be considered a first epilogue, after years of paralyzed adoration at the foot of Madame Arnoux’s “immovable skirt,” and more years of episodic and always unsatisfying affairs with stand-ins, Frédéric is surprised finally to see his beloved come to his house. This visit is an echo of a previous one, which also had a pecuniary motive. On her first visit, Madame Arnoux solicits his help; this time, she pays back a loan. Then it was day, now night falls. Marie’s intentions are not quite clear: Is she offering herself? She has discovered literature: “ ‘When I read love passages in books, it is as if you were here before me’ ” (p. 471). However, whereas Frédéric gave her a rose during the first visit, she now cuts a lock of hair for him as a token of love, but it is white. In part repulsed by a quasi-incestuous contract, in part attempting to preserve his ideal, and in part because of prudence—“what an inconvenience it would be!” (p. 473)-Frédéric lets Marie go. She who “appeared” at the beginning finally “disappears” in a cab: “And that was all” (p. 474).

Madame Arnoux is constantly perceived through her admirer’s eyes, which gives her an enigmatic character and a mysterious aura. Frédéric often refers to her as to “the Other”: How could such a magnified third person be incarnated as a “you”? Always unattainable, she propels an infinite desire, stimulated less by her presence than by imagination and memory. No mistress can rival her; Frédéric cries during his first night with Rosanette, and his engagement to Madame Dambreuse satisfies primarily his vanity. Yet is this “Other” so incommensurate with all “others”? Are not all “others” somehow the same; are not all women somehow interchangeable?

This confusion is prompted by the similarity of the two women’s furniture and knickknacks, provided by Madame Arnoux’s husband, who is also Rosanette’s lover. Later, the reminiscence of his “old love” helps Frédéric court Madame Dambreuse. And he sarcastically cultivates the confusion between Madame Dambreuse and Rosanette: “He would repeat to one the oath which he had just uttered to the other, send them both identical bouquets, write to them at the same time ... and the more he deceived one of the two, no matter which, the fonder of him she grew” (p. 434). The four women are gathered only once, at a Dambreuse reception not all that different in its formality from the Arnoux dinners and even the orgies at Rosanette’s, since many male guests are the same; the courtesan is represented only by her portrait—but Frédéric spends the night with her, while dreaming of the Other.

To reassert the difference and superiority of that Other, Frédéric finally rejects all her rivals. At the auction following Arnoux’s bankruptcy and Madame Arnoux’s departure from Paris, Rosanette and Madame Dambreuse compete for the spoils of the vanished idol: a Renaissance casket metaphorically linked to her person. It evokes her beauty, her thrift, her chastity (for the casket is closed, like her body), and perhaps the emptiness of her phantasmagoric figure. Frédéric forgets that he saw it in Rosanette’s apartment and that it contained Arnoux’s extravagant bills. Buying it is tantamount to profaning his Beloved. When Madame Dambreuse places the highest bid, Frédéric breaks up with her: This one magnanimous gesture and decisive action in his sentimental life leaves him annihilated.

The Story of a Young Man
is also, according to Flaubert, “the moral history of the men of my generation.” Hence his deliberately selective and sketchy (albeit extremely precise) recording of the events of the 1848 period. Flaubert was in Paris in February with his friend Maxime du Camp, who took notes, and he apprehended the riots “from the point of view of art.” Later, pushing the realist taste for exact documentation to its limit, he spent long hours in libraries; consulted and annotated entire volumes and collections of newspapers about the revolution; read the socialist thinkers; informed himself about engraving, crockery, horse racing, restaurant menus, and the Lyons working class; picked his friends’ memories; contacted the revolutionary Armand Barbès; took trips to Nogent and other relevant towns around Paris; and went to Fontainebleau and rectified his notions on transportation between Fontainebleau and Paris in June 1848.