Sentimental Education (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (77 page)

6
(p. 356)
“Long live Napoléon! Long live Barbès! Down with Marie!”:
“Napoléon” refers to Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, who pretended to support the provisional government of 1848. For Barbès, see note 10 to part two. The government minister Alexandre Marie implemented the national workshops (see the preceding note).

7
(p. 357)
Considerant, Lamennais:
Victor-Prosper Considérant, a disciple of the utopian Charles Fourier, was active in the June rebellion. The priest Félicité Lamennais, whose views evolved from royalism and support for papal authority to democracy, was elected as a representative to the Constituent Assembly after the 1848 revolution.

8
(p. 359) Fontainebleau:
In the forest of Fontainebleau sits François I’s imposing Renaissance castle. There Napoleon I signed his first abdication in 1814.

9
(p. 363) a terrible battle had stained Paris with blood:
The decision to dissolve the national workshops triggered an insurrection in Paris that was pitilessly repressed by the army and national guards from June 23 through June 26, 1848.

10
(p. 375) deaths of Bréa and Négrier, about the Deputy Charbonnel... Archbishop of Paris ... Duc d’Aumale had landed at Boulogne ... Barbès had fled. from Vincennes
...
artillery was coming from Bourges:
General Bréa, General Négrier, Deputy Charbonnel, and the Archbishop of Paris were killed by the insurgents. The Duc d’Aumale, a son of Louis-Philippe, fled to England. For Barbès, see note 10 to part two. Vincennes was a prison in a southern suburb of Paris. Bourges is a city in central France.

11
(p. 387)
“
Light up! . . . Prudhomme on a Barricade”:
During demonstrations, lanterns were usually lighted and placed in windows as a sign of solidarity. Prudhomme, a fictional creation of Henri Monnier (1805-1877), is a caricature of the self-satisfied petit bourgeois.

12
(p. 407) Thiers was praised ... There was an immense laugh at Pierre Leroux.... Jokes were made about the phalansterian tail:
For Thiers, see the footnote on p. 179, and for Leroux, see note 18 to part two. A caricature by Cham represented the Fourierist Victor-Prosper Considérant with a tail, a joke inspired by Fourier’s delirious utopianism (see note 8 to part two).

13
(p. 413) the venality of Talleyrand and Mirabeau:
Charles Talleyrand was a politician and diplomat who served all regimes from the 1789 Revolution to the July Monarchy. The revolutionary leader the Comte de Mirabeau accepted bribery from Louis XVI (1754-1793).

14
(p. 445) they are killing our Republic, just as they killed the other one-tbe Roman ... poor Venice! poor Poland! poor Hungary!:
The Roman Republic was proclaimed by a popular insurrection in 1849; but Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte helped the Pope return to power in 1850. (Concerning the bloody repression of Poland’s 1830 rebellion against Russian domination, see notes 11 and 12 to part two above.) In 1849 Austria reestablished its hegemony over Venice and crushed the rebellion in Hungary.

15
(p. 449) Saint John of Correggio, the Infanta Rose of Velasquez... Reynolds ... Lawrence ... the child... that sits in Lady Gower’s lap:
Correggio was a sixteenth-century Italian artist; Diego Velázquez was a seventeenth-century Spanish artist; Sir Joshua Reynolds and Sir Thomas Lawrence (who painted Lady Gower’s portrait) were eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English artists.

Gustave Flaubert is widely credited with having had a primary influence on literary Realism. Following in the footsteps of the French masters Stendhal and Honoré de Balzac and paving the way for Alphonse Daudet, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, and Émile Zola, Flaubert codified for French literature a style that blended finely observed detail about human society with historical accuracy and detached narration, a style commonly referred to as Realism—a term first applied to realistic, representational painting. (Zola coined “Naturalism” to describe his own literary efforts, and many writers who came after preferred this term.) The rejection of merely subjective—and what Flaubert would have deemed escapist—literature was quickly taken up by writers the world over. Realism was embraced in Germany by Gerhart Hauptmann, Arno Holz, Johannes Schlaf, and Thomas Mann; in England by George Gissing, Arnold Bennett, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Butler, and W. Somerset Maugham; and in America by William Dean Howells, Henry James, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London, and Theodore Dreiser.

Arguably the Realist writer who benefited most from Flaubert’s influence was the latter’s fellow Frenchman, Guy de Maupassant. A young law student whose schooling was interrupted by his military service in the Franco-Prussian War, Maupassant returned to Paris in 1871 and found himself under the tutelage of Flaubert. This quickly became a literary apprenticeship that would become Maupassant’s most life-defining experience. Flaubert introduced Maupassant to the leading authors of the day—Edmond de Goncourt, Henry James, Ivan Turgenev, Émile Zola—encouraging Maupassant in his own writing. In his study of Maupassant, Pol Neveux observed:

Maupassant adopted from Flaubert his class sensibility, his French nationalism, and his brutal realism, including the frank portrayal of sexuality that characterizes
Madame Bovary.
“The sexual impulse,” wrote Henry James in the
Fortnightly Review
(March 1888), “is ... the wire that moves almost all M. de Maupassant’s puppets, and as he has not hidden it, I cannot see that he has eliminated analysis or made a sacrifice to discretion. His pages are studded with that particular analysis; he is constantly peeping behind the curtain, telling us what he discovers there.” Joseph Conrad, who described Maupassant as “a very splendid sinner,” championed Flaubert’s disciple in
Notes on Life and Letters
(1921): “He looks with an eye of profound pity upon [mankind’s] troubles, deceptions and misery. But he looks at them all. He sees—and does not turn his head.”

“I am always thinking of my poor Flaubert,” wrote Maupassant, “and I say to myself that I should like to die if I were sure that anyone would think of me in the same manner.” Maupassant wrote novels, plays, travel sketches, and more than 300 short stories; of the latter, among the best known are “Boule de suif” (“Tallow Ball”), “La Ficelle” (“The Piece of String”), and “La Parure” (“The Necklace”). Maupassant’s masterful short fiction—his most memorable legacy—has itself inspired the work of Kate Chopin, W. Somerset Maugham, and O. Henry, among others.

“Why does the writing make us chase the writer? Why can’t we leave well enough alone? Why aren’t the books enough?” So wrote British novelist Julian Barnes in
Flaubert’s Parrot
(1984). Described as a “puzzler,”
Flaubert’s Parrot
is narrated by Geoffrey Braithwaite, a retired English doctor, who embarks on a desperate search for a stuffed parrot Flaubert is thought to have kept on his desk for inspiration. As Braithwaite embarks on a detail-embroidered historical adventure, he compulsively attempts to discover the real Flaubert: “Gustave imagined he was a wild beast—he loved to think of himself as a polar bear, distant, savage and solitary. I went along with this, I even called him a wild buffalo of the American prairie; but perhaps he was really just a parrot.” As Braithwaite delves more deeply, he begins to analyze his process of discovery, realizing that his eccentric obsessions are a way of quantifying and documenting human life—an impulse provoked by his wife’s suicide.

In a review of
Flaubert’s Parrot,
Frank Kermode remarked “Wit, charm, fantasy are [Barnes’s] instruments”; add to this an adroit juggling of historical facts and insight, as well as a distinctly British sensibility.
Flaubert’s Parrot
was shortlisted for the Booker McConnell Prize in 1984, and it won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1985 and the Prix Médicis in 1986. In addition to his numerous novels, Barnes has written
Something to Declare
(2002), a book of essays, including many about Gustave Flaubert.

In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as comments contemporaneous with the work, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter
Sentimental Education
through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.

“L’Éducation Sentimentale” is a strange, an indescribable work, about which there would be many more things to say than I have space for, and all of them of the deepest interest. It is moreover, to simplify my statement, very much less satisfying a thing, less pleasing whether in its unity or its variety, than its specific predecessor. But take it as we will, for a success or a failure—M. Faguet indeed ranks it, by the measure of its quantity of intention, a failure, and I on the whole agree with him—the personage offered us as bearing the weight of the drama, and in whom we are invited to that extent to interest ourselves, leaves us mainly wondering what our entertainer could have been thinking of He takes Frédéric Moreau on the threshold of life and conducts him to the extreme of maturity without apparently suspecting for a moment either our wonder or our protest—“Why, why
him?”
Frédéric is positively too poor for his part, too scant for his charge; and we feel with a kind of embarrassment, certainly with a kind of compassion, that it is somehow the business of a protagonist to prevent in his designer an excessive waste of faith ...

We meet Frédéric first, we remain with him long, as a moyen, a provincial bourgeois of the mid-century, educated and not without fortune, thereby with freedom, in whom the life of his day reflects itself. Yet the life of his day, on Flaubert’s showing, hangs together with the poverty of Frédéric’s own inward or for that matter outward life; so that, the whole thing being, for scale, intention and extension, a sort of epic of the usual (with the Revolution of 1848 introduced indeed as an episode), it affects us as an epic without air, without wings to lift it; reminds us in fact more than anything else of a huge balloon, all of silk pieces strongly sewn together and patiently blown up, but that absolutely refuses to leave the ground. The discrimination I here make as against our author is, however, the only one inevitable in a series of remarks so brief. What it really represents—and nothing could be more curious—is that Frédéric enjoys his position not only without the aid of a single “sympathetic” character of consequence, but even without the aid of one with whom we can directly communicate. Can we communicate with the central personage? Or would we really if we could? A hundred times no, and if he himself can communicate with the people shown us as surrounding him this only proves him of their kind. Flaubert on his “real” side was in truth an ironic painter, and ironic to a tune that makes his final accepted state, his present literary dignity and “classic” peace, superficially anomalous. There is an explanation to which I shall immediately come; but I find myself feeling for a moment longer in presence of “L‘Éducation” how much more interesting a writer may be on occasion by the given failure than by the given success. Successes pure and simple disconnect and dismiss him; failures—though I admit they must be a bit qualified—keep him in touch and in relation. Thus it is that as the work of a “gran écrivain” “L’Éducation,” large, laboured, immensely “written,” with beautiful passages and a general emptiness, with a kind of leak in its stored sadness, moreover, by which its moral dignity escapes—thus it is that Flaubert’s ill-starred novel is a curiosity for a literary museum. Thus it is also that it suggests a hundred reflections, and suggests perhaps most of them directly to the intending labourer in the same field. If in short, as I have said, Flaubert is the novelist’s novelist, this performance does more than any other toward making him so.

—from
Notes on Novelists
(1914)

Flaubert’s realism was of a vastly superior sort to pierce behind appearances, and while his surfaces are extraordinary in finish, exactitude, and detail, the aura of persons and things is never wanting. His visualizing power has never been excelled, not even by Balzac; a stroke or two and a man or woman peers from behind the type. He am-bushed himself in the impersonal, and thus his criticism seems hard, cold, and cruel to those readers who look for the occasional personal fillip of Fielding, Thackeray, and Dickens. The frigid withdrawal of self behind the screen of his art gave him all the more freedom to set moving his puppets. For those who mortise the cracks in their imagination with romanticism, Flaubert will never captivate. He seems too remote. He regards his characters too dispassionately. This objectivity is carried to dangerous lengths in “Sentimental Education,” for the book is in the minor key, without much exciting incident; that is, exciting in the Dumas or Stevenson sense; and it is very long ...