Gustave Flaubert

“ Bouvard was clasping the hand of Madame Bordin. She very quickly loosed herself. Before them, open-mouthed and, as it were, petrified, was young Victor staring at them; a short distance away Victorine, stretched on her back, in the full light of day, was inhaling all the flowers which she had gathered.
The old horse, frightened by the peacocks, broke one of the lines with a kick, got his legs entangled in it, and, galloping through the farmyard, dragged the washed linen after him. ”

“ When wilt Thou cease creating? When may I, digging my own grave, stretch myself out within my tomb, and, swinging thus upon the world, list the last breath, the death-gasp, of expiring nature?
When that time comes, away my darts and shroud I’ll hurl. Then shall I free my horse, and he shall graze upon the grass that grows upon the Pyramids, sleep in the palaces of emperors, drink the last drop of water from the sea, and snuff the odour of the last slow drop of blood! By day, by night, through the countless ages, he shall roam through fields eternal as the fancy takes him ”

“ The day after his death Théophile Gautier wrote: “He carried with pride the old tattered banner, which had seen so many battles; we can make a shroud of it, the valiant followers of Hernani are no more.” How true! He devoted his entire life to ideals, loving literature for itself; as the last fanatic loves a religion nearly or quite extinct.
“Second-rate genius,” you will say; but fourth-rate ones are not so plentiful now! We are getting wide of the mark. We are so engrossed in stupidity and vulgarism that we shun delicacy and loftiness of mind; we think it a bore to show respect to great men. ”

“ I believe this observation of Musset’s is not his own but Mallefille’s; in the preface of his Don Juan, he is superficial, to my mind. A peasant in our day could see a phantom perfectly and, the next day in broad daylight, reflect in cold blood upon life and death, but not upon flesh and the soul. Hamlet was not reflecting upon the subtleties of some school, but upon human thoughts. On the contrary, it is this state of perpetual fluctuation in Hamlet, this vagueness in which he holds himself, this want of decision in will and solution in thought, which makes him sublime. ”

“ Bouvard shook his head. He had also doubts about hell.
“For every punishment should look to the amelioration of the guilty person, which is impossible where the penalty is eternal; and how many are enduring it? Just think! All the ancients, the Jews, the Mussulmans, the idolaters, the heretics, and the children who have died without baptism—those children created by God, and for what end?—for the purpose of being punished for a sin which they did not commit!” ”

“ He wrote these three stories rapidly and then took up Bouvard and Pécuchet again, a heavy care, under which he must die.
Few existences bear witness to unity so complete as his: his letters show that at nine years of age he was preoccupied with art as if he were fifty. His life, as has been stated by all those who have spoken about him, was, from the awakening of his intelligence to the day of his death, the long development of the same passion—Literature. He sacrificed all to that; his love and tenderness were never separated from his art. ”

“ It is never necessary to fear exaggerating; all the great ones have done it: Michael-Angelo, Rabelais, Shakespeare and Molière. It is a question of making a man take an injection when he has no syringe; well, we must fill the theatre with apothecaries’ syringes; that is clearly the way to reach genius in its true centre, which is very ridiculous. But to suppress exaggeration, there must be continuity, proportion, and harmony in itself. If your good men have a hundred feet, your mountains should be twenty miles high; and what is the ideal if it is not a magnifying? ”

“ Bouvard and Pécuchet remained dejected for eight days.
But it was necessary to comprehend the exact sense of words: what we call combativeness implies contempt for death. If it causes homicides, it may, likewise bring about the saving of lives. Acquisitiveness includes the tact of pickpockets and the ardour of merchants. Irreverence has its parallel in the spirit of criticism, craft in circumspection. An instinct always resolves itself into two parts, a bad one and a good one. ”

“ It seems that in a poet’s family there are always bitter disappointments. Annoying quarrels, honeyed sarcasms, direct insults to art, the million and one things that make your heart bleed,—nothing was spared him while he lived, and these things followed him to his death-bed.
His fellow-countrymen flocked to his funeral as if he had been a public man; even the less educated knowing full well that a superior intellect had passed away. ”

“ Could there ever be a more triumphant imbecile, a more abject fellow, a meaner bourgeois! No, no words could ever give an idea of the nausea that overcomes me when I contemplate that old pumpkin of a diplomat, fattening his stupidity under the muck of the bourgeoisie. Would it be possible to treat with more naïve and more inappropriate unceremoniousness, matters of religion, the people, liberty, the past and the future, national history and natural history, everything? He seems to me as eternal as mediocrity itself! ”

“ He dreamed of her as she is represented in church paintings, above a mass of clouds, cherubims at her feet, the Infant Jesus on her breast—Mother of tendernesses, upon whom all the sorrows of the earth have a claim—ideal of woman carried up to heaven; for man exalts that love arising out of the depths of the soul, and his highest aspiration is to rest upon her heart. ”

“ No creature cares for me; nowhere am I loved,—neither in heaven, of which I am a son, nor yet in hell, where I am lord, nor upon earth, where men deem me a god. Naught do I see but paroxysms of rage, rivers of blood, or maddened frenzy. Ne’er shall my eyelids close in slumber, never my spirit find repose, whilst thou, at least, canst rest thy head upon the cool, green freshness of the grave. ”

“ When the human soul is treated with the impartiality with which physical science is treated in the study of material things, an immense step will have been taken; it is the only means by which humanity can put itself above itself. It will then consider itself frankly through the mirror of its works; it will be like God and judge from on high.
Well, I believe that feasible; perhaps, as in mathematics, we have only to find the method. Before all, it will be applicable to art and to religion, which are the two great manifestations of the idea. ”

“ After that, no matter what happens, you will look on the wretchedness of your rivals without indignation, and on their success without envy. As the less favoured will be consoled by the other’s success, the one with a stouter heart will encourage the weaker one; each will contribute his particular gift; this mutual help will avert pride and delay declination.
When one of you dies—as we must all die—let the other treasure his memory; let him use it as a bulwark against weakness, or, better, as a private altar where he can open his heart and pour out his grief. ”

“ There creaks a pump which wets your legs; two boys are rinsing decanters; a parrot repeats from morning till night: “Have you breakfasted, Jacko?” and finally, a brat about ten years old, the son of the house and the hope of the pharmacy, exercises in all sorts of athletics, such as raising himself from the ground by his teeth.
This journey to Trouville has brought the whole inner story of my life before me. I have dreamed much in this theatre of my passions. I now take leave of them forever, I hope; in the part of life that remains, there is time to say adieu to youthful sadness. ”

“ It is not God, but the sinner who damns himself; and the offence being infinite, since God is infinite, the punishment must be infinite. Is that all, sir?”
“Explain the Trinity to me,” said Bouvard.
“With pleasure. Let us take a comparison: the three sides of a triangle, or rather our soul, which contains being, knowing, and willing; what we call faculty in the case of man is person in God. There is the mystery.”
“But the three sides of the triangle are not each the triangle; these three faculties of the soul do not make three souls, and your persons of the Trinity are three Gods.” ”

“ There is not an aim of the human soul which is not reflected in this conception. Ulysses is perhaps the strongest type in all ancient literature, and Hamlet of all modern.
If I were not so weary, I should express my thought at greater length; it is so easy to prattle about the beautiful; but to say in proper style “Shut the door,” or “He has a desire to sleep,” requires more genius than to make all the Courses of Literature in the world.
Criticism is the lowest round on the ladder of literature, nearly always in form and in moral value ”

“ The women at the wash-house were sewing in the same position, the same number were beating their soiled linen in the same blue water, and it rained a little as in former times. It seemed, at certain moments that the universe had become immovable, that everything had become a statue, and that we alone were living. And how insolent nature is! What waggishness on her impudent visage! One tortures his mind trying to comprehend the abyss that separates him from her, but something comes up more farcical still, that is, the abyss that separates us from ourselves. ”

“ You kill both your body and your soul in trying to conciliate two contradictory things: religion and philosophy. The liberalism of your mind revolts against the old rubbish of dogma, and your natural mysticism takes alarm at the extreme consequences whither your reason leads you. Try to confine yourself to science, to pure science; learn to love facts for themselves. Study ideas as naturalists study insects. Such contemplation may be full of tenderness. ”

“ Victor was not long before he fell asleep, lying over his desk.
Perhaps they were distressed by it? Too great a strain was bad for young heads.
“Let us stop,” said Bouvard.
There is nothing so stupid as to make children learn by heart; yet, if the memory is not exercised, it will go to waste, and so they taught the youngsters to recite like parrots the first fables of La Fontaine. The children expressed their approval of the ant that heaped up treasure, of the wolf that devoured the lamb, and of the lion that took everyone’s share. ”

“ That is one reason why you should live in Paris. One always finds there some person to whom one can talk. You were not made for provincial life. I am convinced that among other surroundings you would have suffered less. Each soul has its own atmosphere. You must suffer keenly, in the midst of the folly, lies, calumnies, jealousies, and indescribable pettiness which are almost the inevitable accompaniment of bourgeois life in small towns. Of course, that sort of thing exists in Paris also, but in another form—less direct and less irritating. ”

“ Go side by side, through the woods, reciting poetry; mingle your souls with the sap of the trees and the eternity of God’s creations; abandon yourselves to reverie and the torpors of sublimity! Give up your youth to the Muse; it will replace all other loves. When you have experienced the world’s miseries; when everything, including your own existence, seems to point towards one purpose; when you are ready for any sacrifice, any test,—then, publish your works. ”

“ But Rabelais is to-day a subject of serious study, the favourite author of those rare minds that rise superior to the ordinary limitations of intelligence. Besides those men whose names we cite, La Bruyère studied and appreciated his work with the utmost impartiality. The great romancer was not sufficiently correct to please the scrupulous taste of Boileau, or to accord with the reserve and purity of Racine. That prudish age, governed by Madame de Maintenon, so well typified in the flat and angular garden at Versailles, was ashamed of literature at once so frank and open, nude and picturesque. ”

“ I do not wish to be unfair; but where has Musset, in any part of his works, harmonized description, dialogue, and intrigue in more than two thousand consecutive rhymes, with such results of composition, such choice of language, in short, where is there a work of such magnitude? What wonderful ability was needed to reproduce Roman society, without affectation, yet keeping within the narrow confines of a dramatic fable!
If you look for the primitive idea, the general element in Louis Bouilhet’s poems, you will find a kind of naturalism that reminds you of the Renaissance. ”

“ It is true that Father Hugo disdains science,—and he proves it!
In my mind this confirms Descartes or Spinoza.
Posterity will not pardon him for attempting to be a thinker, in spite of his nature. Where has the rage for philosophic prose conducted him? And what kind of philosophy? That of Prudhomme, of the Bonhomme Richard, or of Béranger. He is no more of a thinker than Racine, or La Fontaine, whom he considers mediocre; that is, in this book he flows with the current, even as they; he gathers all the banal ideas of his epoch, and with such persistence that he forgets his work and his art. ”

“ Pécuchet’s headpiece, placed in front of the fire, was not yet dry. While stretching it out he felt something in the lining, and out tumbled a medal of St. Joseph.
Madame de Noares wished to ascertain from Pécuchet whether he had not experienced some kind of change, bringing him happiness, and betrayed herself by her questions. On one occasion, whilst he was playing billiards, she had sewn the medal in his cap.
Evidently she was in love with him: they might marry; she was a widow, and he had had no suspicion of this attachment, which might have brought about his life’s happiness. ”