Sentimental Education (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (5 page)

He was well aware of the difficulties of the historical novel, as expressed by Alessandro Manzoni in his essay
On the Historical Novel (Del romanzo storico),
published in 1850. Manzoni contends that such a text either blurs the distinction between the factual and the fictional, and the reader, who wants to learn something certain about the past, is disappointed; or it expressly distinguishes the factual from the fictional, and the reader, who demands unity from a work of art, is again disappointed. Thus neither the realist nor the aesthete is satisfied. The fact is, Manzoni concludes, the separation of truth and invention, or veracity and verisimilitude, is impossible in the historical novel, but neither does this subgenre have any unified form; consequently, it can never be fully satisfactory.

“Historical” means true, or at least veracious, but it also means worthy to be recorded, memorable. “And then, what to choose among the real Facts?” Flaubert asked in a letter of March 1868
(Correspondance,
vol. 3, p. 734). This was a crucial question, all the more so because he was dealing with a period still present in the minds of his contemporaries, a period rich in events that threatened to obfuscate the imaginary plot. “I have a very hard time embedding my characters in the political events of’48!” he deplored in the same passage. “I am afraid the background will absorb the foreground. Here is the defect of the historical genre. The historical characters are more interesting than the fictional ones.... The public will take less interest in Frédéric than in Lamartine?” This is why Flaubert was very careful not to let Lamartine and his famous, or infamous, partisans and adversaries take to the stage, and focused instead on made-up, albeit highly representative, actors.

Finally, though “historical” normally implies “public,” the novel concentrates on individual matters. Since the “novel” of “historical novel” is the substantive and “historical” only the attribute, the latter has to remain subordinate to the former. A way to negotiate this tense relationship is to hint at a secret correspondence between the general turmoil and the private tribulations. In
Sentimental Education,
there is an interconnectedness, sometimes an analogy, or, more often, an ironic link between the major scenes of collective life and those of the personal, especially amorous, life. In an unpublished note, Flaubert expressed his wish to “show that Sentimentalism (its development since 1830) follows Politics and reproduces its phases.” When Frédéric, having hired a hotel room for his first rendezvous, waits for Madame Arnoux, who does not show up, the February insurrection and its ambiguous promises start rumbling. When he falls back on Rosanette, he proclaims: “ ‘I am following the fashion! I’m reforming myself!’ ” (p. 316), “reform” being the slogan of the day. When he takes Rosanette to his hotel room, he notes: “ ‘Ah! They’re killing off some bourgeois’ ” on the Boulevard des Capucines (p. 317). Frédéric and Rosanette try to escape to Fontainebleau during the June repression. And the auction sale of the Arnoux property, at which Frédéric drops Madame Dambreuse, takes place on the eve of Bonaparte’s coup.

At Fontainebleau, Frédéric and Rosanette try to flee from their contemporary history into their sentimental novel. In the forest of Fontainebleau, the linear time of the calendar, punctuated by dates, is superseded by the cyclical and hazy time of the idyllic mode. The idyll resists history thanks to the combined forces of eternal Nature and intimate Love. The fresh and sensuous Rosanette can be assimilated to Nature—to these woods, in fact, as contaminated as she is by civilization. As for Love, Rosanette is an expert. But as such—as a whore, as a “public” woman—she is deprived of any intimacy, bereft of her life, her bed, her body, and her soul. And when she, the daughter of silk workers in Lyons, divulges her own sentimental education—“to what lover did she owe her education?” (p. 369)—she evokes public evils: poverty, exploitation, child prostitution, and implicitly, popular revolt (that of the silk-workers of Lyons in 1831). As a whole, the story of the couple, full of delays and cheating, presents many similarities with history. In the end, Frédéric decides to leave Rosanette behind and, alleging a civic sense that does not encroach on his private interests, goes back to the embattled capital.

Fontainebleau, the site of a François I castle, offers the lovers a flight into past history. While monarchy is being abolished in Paris, the Fontainebleau domain maintains the “impassiveness of royalty” (p. 359); while the Tuileries are ransacked, the Renaissance palace remains severely sumptuous. Paris is a prey to urgency, in Fontainebleau an “emanation of the centuries, overwhelming and funereal, like the scent of a mummy” prevails (p. 362). Yet the tourists penetrating the remote apartments and scrutinizing the furniture and the portraits with a lascivious titillation are not without a certain similarity to the mob invading the Tuileries and the princesses’ bedrooms, with an obscene and desecrating curiosity.

As a museum, Fontainebleau could complement the pair’s educational trajectory, were it not that the two tend to reduce past history to private, sentimental details. The illiterate Rosanette interprets the deeds of the grandees according to her own petty preoccupations; did Christine of Sweden have her favorite assassinated at Fontainebleau? “ ‘No doubt it was jealousy? Better watch out!’ ” (p. 359). The well-read Frédéric relates more accurately to those who haunted these rooms, Emperor Charles V, the Valois kings, Henri IV, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire. Their trysts arouse him, and the evocation of Diane de Poitiers, mistress of Henri II, fills him with a “mysterious feeling of retrospective lust” (p. 360). In a way, before abandoning Rosanette for the happenings of his time, he is unfaithful to her by his lust for bygone times. In
Sentimental Education,
history, past and present, is contaminated by the private; conversely, the private is contaminated by history.

Just like Frédéric’s destiny and his great passion, the revolution as reconstructed in the book is tossed off according to chance, sudden inspirations, and weaknesses. Like Frédéric’s destiny and passion, it appears split between the future (here the socialist utopia) and its past references: “ ‘A new ’89 is in preparation
” (p. 20). Yet 1789 is a detrimental precedent: “Every person at that time modeled himself after someone, one copied Saint-Just, another Danton, another Marat”; another one “tried to be like Blanqui, who imitated Robespierre” (p. 340). The repetition, noted by Marx, does not end there. Consider, for instance, the mystery of the “calf’s head,” an English import:

Flaubertian “folly,” which amounts to uncontrolled reiteration, does not spare the sequels of revolutions: that of Cromwell, that of the Jacobins, that of 1848, the epigones imitating with reverence what the predecessors imitated as a mockery. And the coup of December 1851 reiterates that of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1799, with a nephew who is but a shadow of his monumental uncle. The course of history also betrays circularity and entropy.

Who is Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte? A Napoleon with a touch of the royal Louis, a prince elected president before usurping power, an adventurer who garners the benefits of autocracy, republic, and military populism. Even though he accepted the new regime, Flaubert shows how this amalgam is in sync with the ideological confusion and the recantations of almost all the characters in
Sentimental Education:
from Dambreuse, an ex-noble turned speculator who always sides with the victor, to Martinon, an opportunist who sleeps with Madame Dambreuse and marries her husband’s daughter; from Sénécal, a Jacobin with fascistic tendencies, to Regimbart, a protestor and a drunkard; from the self-righteous Madame Dambreuse to la Vatnaz, a procuress and feminist full of envy; and even Dussardier, the honest republican misled into serving the forces of repression. The exasperation of the revolution reduces them all to “an equality of brute beasts, a same level of bloody turpitude; for the fanaticism of self-interest balanced the frenzy of the poor, aristocracy had the same fits of fury as the mob, and the cotton cap did not prove less hideous than the red cap” (pp. 377-378).

This messy history is largely apprehended from a private perspective, that of Frédéric. As a consequence, even though the narrator never intervenes, history is not described in an impartial way. Of course, Frédéric is neutral, and even too much so; yet his is not the neutrality of the historian who is above any partisanship but rather that of the idler, who gets excited briefly and then leaves. The historian scrutinizes the complexity of the situation, the idler sees surfaces; the historian discerns links and proposes syntheses, the idler catches glimpses; the historian looks for reasons, the idler is stopped by a detail or an image. Frédéric, a quick-to-be-enthused witness, and his comrade Hussonnet, whose nose is more delicate, attend the February events as though they were a spectacle that the one finds sublime and the other nauseating, and in which the People becomes flux, whirlwind, beast—undifferentiated, indefinite, elusive. The interposition of the fictional character, himself a prey to the vertigo of history, has the unexpected consequence of rendering unreal the very experiences he has a chance to live: “The wounded who sank to the ground, the dead lying at his feet, did not seem like persons really wounded or really dead” (p. 323). This is all the more the case because the inexhaustible discourses on the facts obfuscate the facts themselves. Flaubert lets his characters chatter, more or less banally, foolishly, sometimes unintelligibly: At the Club of Intelligence (what a misnomer!), a militant speaks Spanish, and the author does not translate; another one talks chivalric jargon. The collision of half-cooked ideas, deceitful statements, worn-out slogans, broken declamations, and obscure allusions results in the same magma in the political gatherings as in the banquets and orgies, and proves no more efficacious than the stereotypical love rhetoric.

 

While the characters’ existences give a sense of reiteration, circularity, and entropy, Flaubert’s mode of composition, in its meandering and occasionally enigmatic complexity, remains highly controlled. If in the epilogue Frédéric and Deslauriers “blamed bad luck” (p. 477), Flaubert calls the shots. If his descriptions are fragmented, he has an overarching aesthetic objective. If his protagonist’s perspective, which largely dominates, is not enlightening, he intends it to be so: For only idiots, whose received ideas regularly, although not always visibly, punctuate the text, believe in the certainty of meaning.

Frédéric never completes his artistic education; he becomes neither a writer nor a painter, hardly even an amateur. A similar degradation affects Arnoux’s endeavors. He goes from the thriving enterprise of “L
Art industriel” (an oxymoron for Flaubert) to a crockery factory to the commerce of religious knickknacks; this degradation parallels his descent from his wife to the fashionable Rosanette to a nameless working girl. As for the painter Pellerin, he is an uninspired artist, and a pompous theoretician who merely echoes contemporary trends. Neoclassical during the Restoration, he turns eclectic under Louis-Philippe, and his portrait of Rosanette can be dubbed an old Italian piece. In 1848 he represents the Republic in the guise of Jesus Christ conducting a locomotive! Later he shouts, “Down with Realism,” and renders Rosanette’s dead baby as a grotesque still life, before finishing as a photographer. Like everything else, art is compromised by money, politics, and enormous egos, such as that of the ham comedian Delmar, who changes names and allegiances to hide his lack of substance. All these figures serve as foils to the author’s creative ideal. Transcending the stereotypes of the accursed Romantic genius as well as of the Realist laborer or expert, Flaubert would rather remain a secular monk persisting in the cult of style, prey to the pangs of perpetual doubt and self-derision.