Gustave Flaubert, Trois Contes

Trois Contes is entitled Tre racconti in Italian, and we could not call them anything else, but the term conte (as opposed to récit or nouvelle) underlines the link with oral narrative, with the marvellous and naive, in short with the folktale. This connotation applies to all three tales: not just to The Legend of St Julien the Hospitaller which is one of the first examples of a modern writer adopting the ‘primitive’ taste of medieval and popular art, and to Hérodias, which is a historical reconstruction that is erudite, visionary and aesthetically appealing, but also to Un Coeur Simple (A Simple Heart), where contemporary daily reality is experienced by a poor serving woman of simple spirit.

The three stories of Trois Contes are almost a distillation of all of Flaubert, and since they can be read in an evening I strongly recommend them to all those who want to pay homage, swift though it may be, to the sage of Croisset on the occasion of his centenary. (For the centenary Einaudi is reissuing them in the excellent translation by Lalla Romano.) In fact, those with even less time can omit Hérodias (its presence in the volume has always seemed to me rather dispersive and redundant) and concentrate all their attention on A Simple Heart and The Legend of St Julien, starting out from their fundamentally visual quality.

There is a history of visibility in the novel – of the novel as the art of making persons and things visible – which coincides with some of the phases of the history of the novel itself, though not with all of them. From Madame de Lafayette to Benjamin Constant the novel explores the human mind with prodigious accuracy, but these pages are like closed shutters which prevent anything else from being seen. Visibility in the novel begins with Stendhal and Balzac, and reaches in Flaubert the ideal rapport between word and image (supreme economy with maximum effect). The crisis of visibility in the novel will begin about half a century later, coinciding with the advent of the cinema.

A Simple Heart is a tale all about things that are seen, consisting of simple, light sentences in which something always happens: the moon on the Normandy meadows shining on the recumbent cattle, two women and two children passing by, a bull emerging from the mist charging head down, Félicité throwing earth in his eyes to allow the others to escape over a hedge; or the port at Honfleur with the derricks lifting the horses before lowering them into the boats, her nephew the cabin-boy whom Félicité manages to see for a second before he is immediately hidden again by a sail; and above all Félicité’s little bedroom, crammed with objects, souvenirs of her own life and of that of her masters, where a holy water font in coconut wood stands alongside a block of blue soap, and over everything dominates the famous stuffed parrot, which is almost emblematic of what life has not given to the poor serving woman. We see all these things through Félicité’s own eyes: the transparency of the sentences is the only possible medium to represent her purity and natural nobility in accepting both the good and the bad things in life.

In The Legend of St Julien the Hospitaller the visual world is that of a tapestry or a miniature in a manuscript or stained-glass window in a cathedral, but we experience it from the inside as if we too were figures that had been embroidered, illuminated or composed of coloured glass. The tale is dominated by a profusion of animals of every kind, typical of Gothic art. Stags, deer, falcons, wood grouse, storks: Julien the hunter is pushed towards the animal world by a bloody instinct and the tale treads the tenuous line between cruelty and compassion, until we finally seem to have entered the very heart of this zoomorphous world. In an extraordinary passage Julien finds himself suffocated by everything that is feathery, hairy or scaly, the forest all around him turns into a crowded, tangled bestiary of all fauna, including the most exotic (there are even parrots, as though in distant homage to old Félicité). At that point the animals are no longer the privileged targets of our sight, rather it is we ourselves who are captured by the animals’ gaze, by that firmament of eyes staring at us: we feel as if we are crossing to the other side and seem to see the human world through the round, impassive eyes of an owl.

Félicité’s eye, the owl’s eye, Flaubert’s eye. We realise that the real theme of this man who was so apparently closed up in himself was the identification with the Other. In the sensual embrace of Saint Julien and the leper we can discern the difficult goal towards which Flaubert’s asceticism tends, emblematic of his programme for life and for relating to the world. Perhaps Trois Contes is the testimony of one of the most extraordinary spiritual journeys ever accomplished outside any religion.

[1980]