Something to Declare: Essays on France and French Culture (29 page)

The pair of them also cemented their friendship with brief bouts of Old Fartery They offer, however, an ironic reversal of the classic In-my-day complaint about the sexual morality of the rising generation. In 1866 Sand mentions a young engineer friend of hers, handsome, frequently ogled by women, and yet with a terrible behavioural problem: “He's
in love,
and engaged, and has to wait and work for four years to be in a position to marry, and he's made a
vow,”
she records pityingly. “Morality apart, I don't think young people nowadays have the energy to cope with science and debauchery, tarts and fiancées, all at the same time.” Flaubert harrumphs back that the engineer's vow is, in his opinion, “Pure foolishness … ‘In my day' we made no such vows. We made love! And boldly! … And if we kept away from ‘the Ladies,’ as I did, absolutely, for two years (from 21 to 23),
it was out of pride,
as a challenge to oneself, a show of strength … We were Romantics, in short—Red Romantics, utterly ridiculous, but in full efflorescence.”

Now they are largely retired from the emotional field, and this too is a bond. Sand's well-documented amours lie in the past (though as she Piafly remarked to Maxime Du Camp over dinner in 1868,
“Je ne regrette rien”).
She was established as an active rural grandmother, still swimming in the icy Indre in her mid-sixties, devoted to family and duty, passionate about the education of her granddaughter Aurore. Flaubert was increasingly the book-bound bachelor, letting few into his study and even fewer into his heart. Sand at one point suggests to him that seclusion is “your form of ecstasy”—which he denies with more indignation than conviction.

In addition, they shared an element of gender attenuation, or perhaps gender elision. Sand quotes anatomists to the effect that “there is only one sex,” and writes in one of her earliest letters to Flaubert: “Now that I'm no longer a woman I'd become a man if God were just.” He addresses her as “You who are of the Third Sex,” and after her death recalled “how much femininity there was in that great man.” (The Goncourts, who believed genius to be exclusively a male possession, put it with a gloating coarseness: an autopsy on any famous female writer, Mme Sand or Mme de Staël, would reveal a clitoris growing enviously towards the size of a penis.) For his part, Flaubert described himself as a “male hysteric” in 1867, and is delighted seven years later when a certain Dr. Hardy raises the stakes by pronouncing him “a hysterical old woman,” an observation he judges “profound.”

She post-menopausal, he womb-ridden; both perhaps in the intermediate, sex-free state which is supposedly a writer's ideal. It may have some light significance that both Sand and Flaubert indulged in cross-dressing. In her younger Paris days Sand often wore men's clothes. (There was a restaurateur who once told the Goncourts, “It's a funny thing, but when she's dressed as a man I call her Madame, and when she's dressed as a woman I call her Monsieur.”) As for Flaubert, his only two recorded instances of transvestism both took place at Nohant. On 27 December 1869, he “dressed up as a woman and danced the chachucha with Plauchut. It was grotesque; everyone went wild.” (This is not the cha-cha-cha but the
cachucha,
a Spanish dance.) And on Easter Day 1873 Sand reports: “Flaubert put on a skirt and had a shot at the fandango. He was very funny, but gasping for breath after about five minutes.”

The correspondence between Flaubert and Sand is unusually and dramatically patterned. What often happens in friendship is that the larger issues and beliefs are elaborated early on, and that the relationship then proceeds in terms of amicable arrangements, news, and gossip. Flaubert and Sand begin by courteously laying out both their difference of ideas and their proximity of heart; but such establishings prove merely preliminary. The correspondence untypically gathers weight as it proceeds, and then bursts into two great argumentative climaxes: the first, about politics, society, and the nature of man, is set off by the events of 1870–1; the second, about the nature and function of art, is surprisingly saved until the very last six months of their friendship.

Flaubert viewed the Prussian invasion of 1870 and the Commune of 1871 as the logical conclusion of a historical cycle begun in 1789. France had wandered off the high road of Voltairean thought and plunged itself into a national stupidity typified by the opposing forces of neo-Catholicism and socialism: “Everything is either the Immaculate Conception or workers' lunches.” He is shocked by the fakery of pre-1870 French life, dismayed by French war-lust, indignant at the complacent idiocy of those who govern. George Sand is prepared to agree that “the French no longer have any social or intellectual standards”; after the Lichtenstein crisis of 1867 she writes of a society “paralysed” and “demoralized,” wondering metaphorically, “Have we fallen so low we won't eat anything unless we're assured it won't give us indigestion?” But mostly she displays a firm and consistent trust in “the laws of eternal progress,” and in the essential virtue of humanity. She believes in mass education, which Flaubert considers a waste of time, leading only to the reading of newspapers (that “school for stultification”). She believes in universal suffrage, whereas he knows “I am worth twenty other Croisset voters,” despises the predominance of Number, and proposes government by a Mandarinate. Sand is maternal about human stupidity, regarding it as “a sort of infancy, and all infancy is sacred”; Flaubert regards it as probably ineradicable and certainly inert—“stupidity contains no seed.” Finally, essentially, George Sand loves the proletariat “in the classical sense”; she has “dreamed only of its future.” Flaubert distrusts and fears the mass viewed simply as a mass: he would grant them liberty but not power.

So the events of 1870–i were for the two friends more than a foreign invasion and civil war to be answered in terms of nationalism and politics; they were a personal test of their deepest convictions. Flaubert made various military gestures in the face of the Prussian invasion (buying himself a revolver, drilling some men, and taking them on night patrol); but his main response was the protracted howl of one confirmed in his low opinion of humanity. The Prussian victory heralded for him the end of the Latin world and endorsed the historical superiority of Protestant over Catholic; while the Commune was a throwback to medievalism which “seems to me to surpass Dahomey in ferocity and imbecility.” (Another objection to the Commune was that it made the French forget to go on hating the Prussians.) And if Flaubert sees himself as grimly vindicated, his predictions for the future are even grimmer. The world, he thought, was now entering its third era: after paganism and Christianity, we had arrived at
Muflisme
(boor-ishness, yobbery). This would mean “the return of racial wars,” so that “Within a century we'll see millions of men kill each other at one go.” The future would be “Utilitarian, militaristic, American, and Catholic. Very Catholic!” Predictions of fair accuracy.

For Sand the invasion of 1870 was a moment when humanity took a Pascalian “two steps back.” However, she allowed herself to think that “We need these harsh lessons in order to realize our own foolishness”; she continued to insist optimistically that “out of evil comes good,” and that soon the world would continue its advance “further than ever.” The Commune therefore comes as an unbearable second blow to her: proof that humanity, having learned to take two steps backward, is just longing to take another two. The proletariat, despite being loved in the classical sense, seems no less capable of cruelty, hatred, and blood-lust than its long-term oppressors. Sand is consequently much harder on the Communards than might have been expected: they “have ruined and will continue to ruin the republic, exactly as the priests have ruined Christianity.” While Flaubert becomes almost incoherent with rage, Sand falls into a lucid despair. Her sorrow is, as she admits, partly the result of geopolitical solipsism: “I used to judge others by myself. I'd made great progress in schooling my own character: I'd sown my volcanoes with grass and flowers, and they were getting on well. And I imagined that everyone could enlighten and correct and control themselves.” But grass was never much defence against volcanoes, and Flaubert offers her typically rough consolation: “Our ignorance of history makes us slander our own time. Things have always been like this.” But it would be misleading to see this first climax to the
Correspondance
as an exchange which Flaubert somehow “wins.” Sand may be the disillusioned idealist, in a position of classic pain; but Flaubert is the vindicated pessimist, a condition which can produce only a distant and perverted kind of pleasure.

The second great climax comes right at the end of the correspondence, and consists of no more than a dozen letters, begun by Sand's of 18–19 December 1875. She has by now regained that serenity which Flaubert once described as “contagious”—though he himself never contracted it—while he is embarked upon his own violently irascible valedictory phase. In facing old age and death, they remain, as in all things, different. She writes to him with blithe certainty: “Before long you will gradually be entering the happiest and most propitious part of life: old age. It's then that art reveals itself in all its sweetness; in our youth it manifests itself in anguish.” Flaubert makes no specific reply to this; but doubtless preferred the more saturnine analysis of his fellow-mole Tur-genev: “I have just turned sixty, my dear old fellow … This is the start of the tail-end of life. A Spanish proverb says that the tail is the hardest part to flay. At the same time it's the part that gives least pleasure and satisfaction. Life becomes completely self-centred— a defensive struggle with death; and this exaggeration of the personality means that it ceases to be of interest, even to the person in question.”

Sand, at ease with use of the word “God,” and with a benevolently open mind about the afterlife, moved with comparative calmness towards death. “When I'm no longer useful or agreeable to other people,” she had written in 1872, “I'd like to depart peacefully without a sigh, or at least with no more than a sigh over the poor human race: it doesn't amount to much, but I'm a part of it, and perhaps I don't amount to much either.” For Flaubert, blackly convinced of final extinction, the last years were a true tail-flaying. He signs his letters with his self-caricatures “Cruchard” and “Polycarpe,” the first a wheezing ecclesiastical dotard, the second a (genuine) world-bewailing saint. Melancholy, gouty, and enraged, he turns the old universal charge of stupidity against himself: “I'm becoming too stupid! I bore everybody! In short, your Cruchard has turned into an intolerable old geezer—the result of his own intolerance.” He is so insupportable that a servant of ten years' standing and perfect suitability “announced that he no longer wished to work for me, because ‘I wasn't nice to him any more.’”

Through this self-lacerating despair George Sand continues to trip—how could she not?—like an aesthetic Florence Nightingale. (Sometimes a literal one, too. When Flaubert, brought low by flu, compares himself to the canon of Poitiers, cited by Montaigne, who reputedly kept to his room for thirty years because he was “incommoded by melancholy,” Sand's reply is specific: “There's only one remedy, that's a minimum dose of a demi-centigram of acetate of morphine, taken every evening after you've digested your dinner, for at least eight days.”) In that key letter of December 18–19, she bids them both to “get back to the grindstone” and analyses their respective fictional ambitions: “So what shall we be doing? You'll go in for
desolation,
I'll wager, while I go in for
consolation …
You make your readers sadder than they were before. I'd like to make them less unhappy.” Flaubert's response is especially poignant in the context of this whole correspondence. In one of her earliest letters to him, she signs off with “A kiss on each of the two large diamonds that adorn your
trompette
[nose].” Later the same year, less allusively, she ends with a promise to “kiss you three times on each eye”; while her New Year's greetings for 1868 include further kissing of “your beautiful big eyes.” These ocular tendernesses from his old troubadour are perhaps half-remembered when Flaubert replies to her in late December 1875. He doesn't “go in for desolation,” at least not “wantonly: please believe me!” The problem, he explains to her, in a tone that is hurt, yet also grand and exact, is this: “I cannot change my eyes!”

These last dozen or so letters are, in personal terms, a tenderly serious exchange between two old friends, one increasingly bossy and the other increasingly irritable. On the professional level they grow to something hauntingly magnificent: a face-off between two artists, each differently aware that they are nearing the end of their creative lives, each committed to radically different principles, fighting for those long-held principles, and also, by extension, fighting for the way they have chosen to live their lives. Flaubert always believed that the production of art necessarily involved some amputation of the life. What if he had been wrong, what if he could have taken a wife, had children to dote on, and discovered that this didn't affect his work? Sand always believed that art was not something separate from life but something that grew out of it and fitted into it, something you did, if you had enough energy (and she had lots), after putting the grandchildren to bed and paying the bills. What if she had been wrong, what if her art were rendered flimsy by its ease and normality of manufacture? And they were arguing about the future as well, about what would happen to their art after their joint deaths. Flaubert claimed to write “not for the reader of today, but for all readers as long as the language exists.” Sand replied: “I think
I
shall be completely forgotten, perhaps severely denigrated, in fifty years' time. That's the natural fate of things that are not of the highest order, and I have never thought my work was of the highest order.” But like every other writer, she thought her literary principles were of the highest order; and it is the future, as well as the past, of those principles that they argue over in furious friendship. For it is necessary not just to establish the correctness and superiority of your own aesthetic, but also—for the sake of posterity—to kill off your friend's.