THE FLAUBERT ANNIVERSARY

It is a holy and a wholesome act to visit the grave of a genius, for the memories there aroused may serve as a consolation and an inspiration in our spiritually arid existence. I often thought of this at Rouen when I went there to visit the tomb of Gustave Flaubert, so happily described by François Coppée as The Beethoven of French Prose. A quarter of a century ago I protested in newspapers and books against the tardy official recognition accorded one of the great prose masters of France—which means the world—and one of the most marvellous among novelists. In the Solferino Gardens at Rouen there is the marble memorial by the sculptor Chapu, and on the heights of the Monumental Cemetery, in the Flaubert family plot—Flaubert’s father was a distinguished surgeon—and not far from the Joan of Arc monument, lie the remains of the author of Madame Bovary. His celebrated pupil, Guy de Maupassant, is also remembered in the Solferino Gardens by a statue; another may be seen in the Parc Monceau. But at the time I began urging some form of a memorial to the master of masters nothing had been done. Since then the government has made of the old Flaubert home at Croisset, a half-hour from Rouen, down the Seine, a worthy memorial. The house in which such masterpieces as Madame Bovary, Salammbô, Sentimental Education, The Temptation of St. Antony, Bouvard and Pécuchet, and the Three Tales were created is now a Flaubert museum. Abbé Prevost is said to have written Manon Lescaut there. The old house still stands, though decaying. Flaubert’s study is, however, in fair preservation. The paternal home, occupying a part of the little park, was a dismantled manufactory when last I saw the place.

The faithful Colange, for twenty years servitor in the Flaubert household, kept a café in the neighborhood, and was always ready to talk of his master, of Mme. Flaubert, the mother. In vain I tried to get a photograph of that lady. Colange would not sell it, would not even have it reproduced. I have seen the picture of Dr. Achille Flaubert, but I am more interested in the mothers of men of genius, and I can recall no edition of the works containing the portrait of Mme. Flaubert. But I recall her features. A sweet, mild, intelligent face, betraying evidences of sorrow and resignation. The typical mother. Her son was a celibate, and, with the exception of Louise Colet, he never gave his mother any worriment over women. And it was that lady, whose portrait was recently exhibited at the Courbet retrospective exhibition in the Metropolitan Museum, who was the disturber, not Flaubert. There had been an affair, and understanding the honorable nature of the man, the wily humbug Louise endeavored to make trouble. She wrote Mme. Flaubert, a deeply pious woman; she harried Gustave, who, like most literary psychologists and sounders of feminine souls, was naïve in the practical conduct of his love-affairs. The epitaph of Louise Colet was composed by Maxime Ducamp: “Here lies the woman who compromised Victor Cousin, made Alfred de Musset ridiculous, and tried to assassinate Alphonse Karr; requiescat in pace.” A mean, spiteful masculine witticism this, though well deserved. Of Ducamp a like epitaph might be fabricated: Hic jacet the man who slandered Baudelaire, traduced his loving friend Gustave Flaubert, and who was critically snuffed out of existence by Guy de Maupassant.

I have preserved a card sent to me by Mme. Franklin Grout, dated from Villa Tanit, Antibes, in which she expressed her gratitude for several things I wrote regarding the necessity of a Flaubert museum at Croisset; also for the truth in the Ducamp matter. Mme. Grout was the Caroline Commanville of the Flaubert correspondence, the beloved niece of the master, for whom he sacrificed his personal fortune, a considerable one for a man of letters forty years ago (about one million two hundred thousand francs). Her husband, M. Commanville, had suffered from reverses, and Flaubert, the supposed egoist, cold-blooded, self-centred, an epicurean of literature, calmly deprived himself of his last franc and, nearly sixty years of age, went into harness. His noble act was accomplished without the flaring of trumpets. There were no publishers’ “blurbs” then; nowadays this transaction in hearts and bonds would be yawped to the thousand winds of publicity; luckily, the sensitive great man was spared that vulgar fate. After the death of her husband, Caroline Commanville remarried; her second husband was the Dr. Grout who attended Guy de Maupassant during his fatal illness at the famous Maison Blanche.

Think of it! I saw the great Flaubert in the flesh. I may quote Browning: “Ah, did you once see Shelley plain, and did he stop and speak to you?”... Set me down as hopelessly romantic, as a cultivator of the cult of great artists in an age when there are only imitators or pigmies. It’s born in me, this species of artistic snobbery. I can’t help it. Every now and then some professorial rabbit pokes its pink snout from the academic hutch and passionately pipes, “Romance is the ruin of the world!” and retires on gliding paws. After his naughty proclamation I always take down from the shelf Alice in Wonderland and read with renewed delight the conversation of the Mad Hatter and the March Hare. No romance in the world? Of that particular professorial rabbit Daisy Ashford might say: Render unto Cæsar’s wife the things that are suspicious! Even academic rabbits are romantic; else their breeding propensities have been enormously exaggerated. Flaubert is my romance.

Above all, Flaubert was a musician, a musical poet. His ear was the final court of appeal, and to make sonorous cadences in a language that lacks the essential richness, the diapasonic undertow of the English, is just short of the miraculous. Until the time of Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo the French language was less a liquid, plastic collocation of sounds than a formal pattern, despite the clarity and precision of the eighteenth century; one must go back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for richer, more pregnant speech. Omnipresent with Flaubert was the musician’s idea of composing a masterpiece that should float because of its sheer style. Lyric verbal ecstasy quite overpowered him. He was born December 21, 1821. As Henry James has said, he is one of the glories of French literature. Doubtless there will be a fitting commemoration of his one hundredth birth anniversary two years hence, and I hope that America will be represented at Rouen on that occasion.