Memoirs of a Madman and November

by Gustave Flaubert

  On winter evenings, I would pause before the lit windows of houses where a dance was being held, and I would watch the shadows moving behind the red curtains; I could hear noises richly indicative of luxury – the clink of glasses on trays, the clatter of silverware in dishes; and I told myself that it was perfectly possible for me to join in these thronged festivities, this banquet where everyone was eating his fill; a wild pride stopped me from doing so, since I found that my aloofness made me look attractive, and that my heart was so much nobler for shunning all men’s joys. So I would continue walking through the deserted streets, where the street lamps swung on their chains with a melancholy creak.

  I dreamt of the pain suffered by the poets, I felt their sorrows as they shed glittering tears, and shared them in the depths of my heart – I was overwhelmed by them, distraught; sometimes the empathy they inspired in me seemed to make me their equal, and raised me to their level; pages they had written that left other readers cold would send me into raptures, and give me the prophetic fury of the Pythian goddess. I would inflict these pages on my mind as and when I wanted; I would recite them by the seashore, or walk through the grass, my head bowed, repeating them to myself in the most tender and amorous tone of voice.

  Woe betide him who has never longed to break out in tragic wrath, and does not know by heart lines of love poetry that he can recite to himself in the moonlight! It is wonderful to live in eternal beauty like this, to drape oneself in the mantle of kings, to have at one’s beck and call passions at the highest pitch of their expression, and to love loves that genius has rendered immortal.

  From that time forth, my life was a great and boundless ideal; hovering in free and easy tranquillity, I would fly like a bee gathering my nourishment and sustenance from everything I encountered. I tried to discover, in the rumour of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony; from the clouds and the sun I would compose huge paintings that no language could ever describe; and in human activities too, I would suddenly perceive similarities and contrasts whose luminous precision dazzled even myself. Sometimes art and poetry seemed to open up their endless horizons to me, illuminating each other with their own radiance; I would build palaces of warm glowing copper, and mount ever upwards into a radiant sky, on a staircase of clouds softer than eiderdown.

  The eagle is a proud bird, which perches on lofty peaks; beneath him he sees the clouds rolling through the valleys, drawing the swallows in their train; he sees the rain falling on the fir trees, great blocks of marble crashing down into the mountain streams, the shepherd whistling his goats along, and the chamois leaping from crag to crag. The rain comes pelting down, the storm blasts the trees, the torrents cascade with a noise like a sob, the waterfall smokes and rebounds, the thunder roars and crashes into the mountain peak, but all in vain; he serenely soars above the scene, beating his wings; the hullabaloo on the mountain merely entertains him; he utters cries of joy, does battle with the scudding clouds and mounts ever higher into his immense sky.

  I too derived entertainment from the noise of tempests and the vague hubbub of men rising up to me; I lived in a lofty eyrie, where my heart swelled with pure air, and I uttered shrieks of triumph so as to stave off the boredom of my solitude.

  I was very quickly overcome by an entrenched disgust for the things of this life. One morning, I felt as if I were old, and sated with the experience of a thousand things I had never lived through; I was indifferent towards even the most alluring of them, and felt disdain for the most splendid; everything that other men longed for seemed to me to be pitiable, I could not see a single thing worthy of a moment’s desire – perhaps it was my very vanity that made me feel above ordinary vanity, and perhaps my detachment was merely the excess of a boundless greed. I was like those new buildings on which moss already starts to grow before they are finished; the boisterous joys of my schoolmates bored me, and I would shrug at their sentimental twaddle: some of them would hold on for a whole year to an old white glove or a withered camellia, lavishing kisses and sighs on it; others would write to milliners, or arrange trysts with kitchen maids; the former struck me as idiotic, the latter as grotesque. And then I was equally bored by both good and bad society; I was cynical with the devout and mystical with libertines. As a result, nobody liked me very much at all.

  At that period, when I was still a virgin, I enjoyed staring at prostitutes. I would pass through the streets they lived on, and hang around wherever they plied their trade; sometimes I would speak to them, exposing myself to temptation; I followed them around, touched them and entered the atmosphere they weave around themselves; and, impudent young fellow that I was, I believed I was keeping a cool head – I felt that my heart was empty, but it was the emptiness of the abyss.

  I loved to lose myself in the swirling eddy of the streets. Sometimes I would indulge in some stupid pastime, such as staring fixedly at every passer-by to discover on his face some vice or dominant passion. All those faces swept by me: some were smiling, and whistled as they headed away, their hair fluttering in the wind; others were pale, others red, yet others livid; they swiftly disappeared past me, slipping away one after the other like shop and tavern signs you see when riding along in a cab. Or else I merely watched the feet hurrying along in every direction, and tried to link each foot to a body, each body to an idea, and all these movements to their different goals; I wondered where all these steps were heading, and why all these people were hurrying by. I watched carriages rumbling into gates, as the columned porticoes echoed, and I heard the clatter of the heavy carriage step being let down. Crowds thronged the theatre entrances; I watched the lights glimmering through the fog and, high above, the black and starless sky; at one street corner there was an organ-grinder playing, while children in rags sang and a fruit seller trundled his cart along, lit up with a red lantern; the cafés were filled with uproar, the ices glistened in the light of the gas lamps and the knives glittered on the marble-topped tables; the poor gathered at the door, shivering and standing on tiptoe to watch the rich eat; I would mingle with them, and join them as they gazed at those whom life has blessed; I envied them their vulgar joy, since there are days when you are so sad that you long to make yourself even sadder, and you willingly plunge ever deeper into a facile despair, your heart swollen with tears as you force yourself into a fit of weeping. I’ve often wanted to be a wretched, ragged pauper, to be tormented by hunger pangs, to feel the blood pouring from a wound, and to have some cause of hatred so I can wreak my revenge.

  What then is this nagging disquiet? We are as proud of it as we are proud of our genius, and we conceal it like some secret love. We tell it to nobody, we keep it for ourselves alone, we hug it to our chests with tearful kisses. And yet, what is there to complain of? And what makes us so gloomy at an age when everything smiles on us? Don’t we have devoted friends? A family of which we are the pride and joy, patent-leather boots, a nice padded jacket? All these great nameless sorrows are poetic rhapsodies, memories from our unedifying readings, figures of rhetorical hyperbole – but then maybe happiness too is a metaphor invented on a day of boredom? I have often doubted this, but nowadays I have no doubt at all.

  I have never loved anything, and yet I so longed to love! I will have to die without ever enjoying anything really nice. And now, human life itself still holds out countless facets that I have barely glimpsed: to take just one example, never have I sat on a panting horse by the side of a spring and heard the sound of the horn in the depths of the woods; never, on a warm night filled with the odour of roses, have I felt a friendly hand grasp mine in tremulous silence. Ah, I am emptier, sadder and more vacant than a staved-in barrel whose contents have all been drunk, and on which the spiders weave their webs in the darkness.

  Mine was neither the sorrow of René nor the vast heavenly expanse of his troubles, more splendid and silvery than the moon’s rays; I was neither chaste like Werther nor debauched like Don Juan; I was n
either pure enough nor strong enough for anything.*

  Thus I was exactly what all of you are – a certain man, living, sleeping, eating, drinking, laughing, wrapped up in himself and finding within himself, wherever he goes, the same ruined hopes, dashed the moment they are born, the same dust from things crushed to smithereens, the same paths trodden countless times, the same unexplored, terrible and dreary depths. Are you not tired as I am of waking up every morning and seeing the sun all over again? Tired of living the same life, suffering the same sorrow? Tired of desiring, and tired of being sated? Tired of waiting, and tired of possessing?

  What’s the point of writing this? Why should I continue, in the same doleful voice, to relate the same dismal tale? When I began it, I knew that it was a fine story, but as I proceed with it, my tears fall onto my heart and drown my voice.

  Oh, the pale winter sun! It’s as sad as a memory of happiness. The shadows are all around us; let us gaze into the fire in our hearth; a great tangled web of flames seems to glow between the rows of coals, and to beat like veins pulsating with another life; let us wait for night to fall.

  Let us remember our good days, high-spirited and companionable days when the sun shone, and hidden birds sang once the rain had stopped; days when we went out for a stroll round the garden; the sand on the paths was damp, the corollas of the roses had fallen into the flower beds, and the air was filled with fragrance. Why didn’t we make the most of our happiness while we still held it in our hands? On such days we really should have made an effort to enjoy life and savour each minute at length, so that it would last longer; and there were indeed days that passed by like others, and which I can still remember with delight. Once, for instance, one cold winter’s day, we had come back from a walk and, as there weren’t very many of us, we were allowed to sit down round the stove; we stretched out and warmed ourselves, toasting our hunks of bread on our rulers, as the stovepipe hummed and buzzed; we talked about countless things: the plays we had seen, the women we loved, the time when we would leave school, what we’d do when we grew up, etc. On another occasion, I spent the whole afternoon lying on my back, in a field where there were some little daisies just poking out of the grass; they were yellow and white, and melded into the green of the meadow, making a carpet of infinitely subtle hues; the pure sky was covered with little white clouds rippling like rounded waves; I covered my face with my hands and gazed through them at the sun, which made the edges of my fingers glow golden and turned my flesh pink; I deliberately shut my eyes tight and saw, behind my eyelids, great green blotches fringed with gold. And, one evening, I don’t remember when, I had drowsed off to sleep at the foot of a haystack; when I awoke, night had fallen, the stars were twinkling, the haystacks cast lengthy shadows and the moon had a lovely silvery face.

  How long ago it all was! Was I living at that time? Was it really me? It is me now? Each minute of my life finds itself suddenly separated from the preceding one by an abyss; between yesterday and today there is an eternity that fills me with terror; every day it seems to me that I was less wretched the day before and, without being able to say what else I then possessed, I am sure that I am growing ever poorer, and that each hour as it comes takes something from me. I am just amazed that there is still room in my heart for suffering; but man’s heart is an inexhaustible reservoir of melancholy: one or two moments of happiness fill it to the brim, but all the many miseries of humanity can easily congregate and find lodgings in it together.

  If you had asked me what it was I needed, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you: my desires had no specific object, and my sadness had no immediate cause; or rather, there were so many objects and so many causes that I wouldn’t have been able to isolate a single one of them. All the passions crammed into my heart and became entrapped there; they set each other aflame, as if in concentric mirrors. I was a modest person, yet full of pride; a solitary who dreamt of glory. Shunning society, I yet had a burning ambition to appear on its stage and cut a dash; though chaste, day and night I would abandon myself in my dreams to the most unbridled lusts, the fiercest pleasures. The life that I held pent up inside me congealed within my heart and choked it.

  Sometimes, at the end of my tether, devoured by boundless passions, filled with the burning lava that flowed from my soul, filled with a furious love for nameless things, overcome by nostalgic longing for magnificent dreams, tempted by all the intense pleasures of thought, embracing all poetry and all harmony and crushed beneath the weight of my heart and my pride, I would fall, shattered, into an abyss of pain; the blood rushed to my face, my arteries pounded deafeningly, my breast seemed about to break, I could no longer see, I could no longer feel, I was drunk, I was mad, I imagined that I was a great man, I imagined that I harboured some supreme incarnation, the revelation of which would fill the world with amazement – and when this incarnation felt itself being torn apart, this was the very life of the god I bore within my entrails. To that magnificent god I sacrificed every hour of my youth; I had made of myself a temple to contain something divine, but the temple has remained empty, nettles have grown between the stones, the pillars are crumbling, and now the owls are making their nests within it. I did not take advantage of my existence, and so my existence took advantage of me, and wore me down; my dreams drained my energies more than any great labour; an entire creation, motionless, unaware of itself, led a secret and subdued life under the surface of my own; I was a sleeping chaos of countless fecund principles that did not know how to manifest themselves, or what to do with themselves; they were seeking their proper shape and awaiting the mould in which they could be cast.

  I was, in the variety of my being, like an immense jungle in India, where life throbs in every atom and appears, monstrous or adorable, in every ray of sunlight; the azure sky is filled with perfumes and poisons; tigers leap, elephants tread proudly like living pagodas, gods, mysterious and deformed, lurk in the depths of caves among great heaps of gold; and through the middle of it all flows the broad river, with open-jawed crocodiles slapping their scales against the lotus on the river bank, and its islands of flowers that the current sweeps away together with tree trunks and corpses turned rotten and green by the plague. And yet I loved life, but only when it was expansive, radiant, gleaming; I loved it in the furious gallop of warhorses, in the glitter of the stars, in the movement of the waves as they hasten to the shore; I loved it in the quiver of sweet bare breasts, in the tremulousness of loving glances, in the vibration of violin strings, in the shimmering of oak trees, in the setting sun which fills the windows with its gold and makes you think of the balconies of Babylon on which queens used to lean as they gazed across Asia.

  And amidst all this I remained immobile; between all those activities unfolding before my eyes – activities that I deliberately provoked – I remained inactive, as inert as a statue surrounded by a swarm of flies buzzing round its ears and scampering across its marble surface.

  Oh, how intensely I would have loved, if I had loved – if I had been able to concentrate on one single point all those divergent forces that assembled within me! Sometimes I would have given anything to find a woman; I longed to love her, she meant the world to me, I expected everything from her, she was my sun of poetry, who would make every flower blossom and every beauty gleam resplendent; I promised myself a divine love, and endowed her in advance with a halo so bright it dazzled me; and the first woman who came towards me, by chance, through the crowd, was the woman to whom I vowed my soul, and I shot her a significant glance so that she would easily understand me, would read my entire being from this single glance and love me. I placed my destiny in the hands of this chance encounter, but she passed by like all the others, like the last ones and the next ones, and then I would come down to earth, in a sorrier state than a torn sail drenched by the storm.

  After such moments of delirium, life resumed, opening out onto the eternal monotony of its passing hours and its repetitive days; I would await the evening impatiently, counting how many evenings
there still remained before the end of the month; I wished it was already the next season, which I could see smiling with the promise of a better life. Sometimes, to shake off this leaden mantle that weighed down on my shoulders and keep my head busy with science and ideas, I tried to work, to read; I would open a book, and then two books, and then ten, and without having read two lines of a single one of them, I would throw them down in disgust and fall back into my somnolent boredom.

  What are we supposed to do here on earth? What should we dream of? What should we build? Tell me then, you who find life entertaining, you who march towards a goal and torment yourself to achieve some particular aim!

  I thought nothing good enough for me, and in the same way I thought myself good for nothing. To work, to sacrifice everything for an idea, for an ambition, a wretched and trivial ambition, to have a position, a name?… And then? What’s the use! Anyway, I didn’t like fame, and the most resounding acclaim would never have satisfied me, since it would never have harmonized perfectly with my heart’s longings.

  I was born longing to die. Nothing seemed to me more utterly foolish than life, or more shameful than to care two pins for it. Brought up without a religion, like all the men of my age, I had neither the cut-and-dried happiness of the atheists, nor the ironical insouciance of the sceptics. If I did, doubtless on a mere whim, sometimes go into a church, it was to listen to the organ, to admire the stone statuettes in their niches; but as for dogma, I didn’t take a single step towards accepting it; I felt myself to be a true son of Voltaire.