Memoirs of a Madman and November

by Gustave Flaubert

  “An enormous bed was set in the alcove, and he pulled me over to it with a cry; I felt as if I were drowning in all the eiderdown and the mattresses, his body weighed down on mine, it was the most dreadful torment, his flabby lips covered mine with cold kisses, the bedroom ceiling was crushing me. How happy he was! He was positively swooning! Trying in turn to feel some excitement, I managed to stimulate his senses, at least so it appeared; but what did I care about his pleasure! It was my pleasure that I needed, it was mine that I longed for, I tried to suck it from his hollow mouth and his feeble limbs, I drew as much as I could from every bit of that old man, and made an incredible effort to combine all the lubricious longings pent up within me, but the only feeling I succeeded in summoning up was a sense of disgust at my first night of debauchery.

  “Hardly had he left than I rose and went over to the window; I opened it and let the air cool my skin; I would have liked the ocean to wash me clean of him; I remade my bed, carefully smoothing down all the places where that corpse had laboured me with his convulsions. I spent the whole night weeping; in despair, I moaned aloud like a tiger that has just been castrated. Ah, if only you had turned up just then! If only we had got to know each other at that time! If only you had been the same age as me, then we could have loved one another, when I was sixteen, when my heart was fresh! Our entire lives would have been spent in love, my arms would have worn themselves out in hugging you to me, and my eyes in gazing deep into yours.”

  She continued:

  “I was now a great lady: I got up at midday, I had liveried servants who followed me everywhere, and a calash in which I could stretch out full length on cushions; my pedigree courser could jump wonderfully well over the tree trunks, and the black plume of my riding hat swayed gracefully; but as I had become rich overnight, all this luxury merely aroused more desires instead of appeasing them. Soon I had a reputation; men competed to have me; my lovers would do innumerable crazy things to please me; every evening I would read that day’s love letters, trying to find the new expression of some heart cast in a different mould from the others and meant for me alone. But they were all alike; I knew in advance how their phrases would end and the way they would fall to their knees; there were two I rejected on a whim, they killed themselves – their deaths didn’t affect me; whatever did they have to go and die for? Why didn’t they overcome every obstacle to have me? If I loved a man, there would not be any sea too vast nor any wall too high that would stop me reaching him. If I had been a man, how easily I would have found a way to bribe guards, to climb up to windows at night-time, and to stifle under my lips the cries of my victim, a victim deceived each morning by the hope I had fostered the night before!

  “I drove them away in anger and took others; the monotony of pleasure drove me to distraction, and I ran after it in frenzied pursuit, always athirst for new pleasures that I had magnificently dreamt of; I was like mariners in distress who drink the sea water and cannot stop themselves drinking it, they are so parched by thirst!

  “Dandies or boors, I wanted to see if they were all the same; I savoured the passion of men with flabby, white hands, their dyed hair stuck to their temples; I had pale adolescents, as blond and effeminate as girls, who came to expire on me; old men too sullied me with their decrepit joys, and when I awoke I would contemplate their oppressed chests and their lifeless eyes. On a wooden bench, in some village tavern, between a jar of wine and a pipe of tobacco, a man of the people too would seize me in his violent embrace; like him, I put on a display of coarse joy and easygoing manners; but the common rabble don’t make love any better than the nobility, and a bale of hay is no warmer than a sofa. To inflame their ardour, I devoted myself to some of them as their slave girl, and they did not love me any the more; for complete dolts I lowered myself to the most degrading level, and in return they hated and despised me, whereas I longed to lavish a hundred times more caresses on them and drown them in happiness. Finally, hoping that people with deformities might love better than the others, and that sickly natures would tend to cling to life by its pleasures, I gave myself to hunchbacks, Negroes, dwarves; I gave them nights fit to fill a millionaire with jealousy, but maybe I alarmed them, since they soon left me. Neither rich nor poor, handsome nor ugly managed to assuage the love I begged them to satisfy; all of them, feeble, wilting, conceived in tedium, stunted freaks spawned by paralytics who easily get drunk on wine and are killed by women, fearful of dying between the sheets the way others die in battle – there was not one I didn’t see exhausted after just one hour. So there are no longer any of those divine youths left on earth as once there were! No more Bacchuses, no more Apollos, no more of those heroes who strode forth naked, crowned with vine leaves and laurels! I was made to be the mistress of an emperor; I needed the love of a bandit, on a stony rock under the African sun; I longed for the embrace of serpents, and the roaring kisses that lions exchange with one another.

  “At that time I used to read a great deal; there were two books in particular that I read over and over: Paul and Virginie and another one called The Crimes of Queens. This included portraits of Messalina, Theodora, Marguerite of Burgundy, Mary Stuart and Catherine II.* ‘Be a queen,’ I said to myself, ‘and make the crowd fall in love with you!’ Well, I was a queen, a queen in the way one can be nowadays; on entering my box in the theatre I would sweep the audience with a triumphant and provocative gaze, the heads of countless people followed every twitch of my eyebrows, and I dominated everything by the insolence of my beauty.

  “Still, tired of endlessly having to pursue a lover, and desiring one more than ever, at any price, and having made of vice a cherished source of torment, I rushed to this place, my heart aflame as if my virginity were still for sale; despite my refined tastes, I resigned myself to living in squalor; despite my love of opulence, I was ready to sleep in poverty, since by dint of descending so low, I perhaps no longer aspired to climb ever upwards; as my organs exhausted themselves, my cravings would no doubt slacken; I wished in this way to shed them once and for all, and to lose any taste for what I had once so fervently desired. Yes: though I had bathed in strawberries and milk, I came here to lie down on that dirty mattress which everyone tramples underfoot; instead of being the mistress of one man, I made myself the servant of all – and what a harsh master I thereby took! No more fire in the winter, no more fine wines with my meals, I have worn the same dress for a year – but never mind! Isn’t it my job to be naked? But my last thought, my last hope – do you know what it is? Oh, I was counting on it: it was that one day I might find what I had never encountered, the man who has always evaded me, whom I have pursued in the beds of dapper young men and in the dress circles of theatres. He’s a fantasy figure who exists only in my heart and whom I long to hold in my hands; one fine day, I hoped, someone is bound to come – there is every probability: someone who is taller, nobler, stronger; he will have wide-open eyes like those of sultans’ wives, his voice will utter well-rounded, lascivious melodies, his limbs will have the terrible and voluptuous suppleness of leopards, he will smell of odours so strong that they make you swoon, and his teeth will sink with delight into this swelling breast. At each new arrival I asked myself, ‘Is this him?’ and at another, ‘Is it him? Let him love me! Let him love me! Let him beat me! Let him break me! All by myself I will comprise a whole harem for him; I know the flowers that stimulate and the drinks that intoxicate, and how even exhaustion can be transformed into a blissful ecstasy. I will be coquettish when he wants me to be, to irritate his vanity or amuse his mind, and then all at once he will find me soft and yielding like a reed, breathing gentle words and sighs of tenderness; for him I will twist in snaky coils, at night I will quiver in sudden spasms and violent shudders. In some warm country, drinking fine wine from a crystal goblet, I will dance Spanish dances for him, with castanets, or else I will jump into the air shrieking a war chant, like savage women; if he is a lover of statues and paintings, I will drape myself in the poses of the great masters, and before the
m he will fall to his knees; if he prefers me to be his bosom friend, I will dress as a man, and go hunting with him; I will help him perform his acts of vengeance; if he wishes to assassinate someone, I will be his lookout; if he is a robber, we will commit robberies together; I will love his clothes and the coat in which he is wrapped.’ But no – never! never! Time may have elapsed and one morning succeeded another; each part of my body has been worn down in vain by every pleasure employed by men for their delectation: I have stayed exactly the way I was, at ten years old – a virgin, if a virgin is a woman who has no husband and no lover, who has never known pleasure and dreams of it ceaselessly, who concocts alluring phantoms for herself and sees them in her dreams, who hears their voices in the sound of the winds, who seeks their features in the face of the moon. I am a virgin! Does that make you laugh? But don’t I have the vague presentiments, the ardent yearnings of a virgin? I have everything that belongs to a virgin, except virginity itself.

  “Look at my bedhead, where you see all those criss-crossed lines on the mahogany; they are the marks left by the fingernails of all those who have twisted and turned there, all those whose heads have bumped up against it; I never had a thing in common with them; we were united as intimately as human arms can permit, and yet a gulf always separated me from them. Oh, how often, as they were driven wild, and longing to be swallowed up into the depths of their ecstasy, did I mentally take myself off to a place a thousand leagues from there, to share the rush mat of a savage, or the cave, adorned with sheepskins, of some shepherd of the Abruzzi!

  “Indeed, no one comes for me, no one knows me; they seek in me, perhaps, a particular woman, just as I seek in them a particular man; in the streets, don’t we see more than one dog trotting along sniffing at the piles of rubbish, looking for chicken bones and scraps of meat? In the same way, who will ever know of all the exalted loves that are lavished on a common whore, all the fine elegies contained in the ‘hello’ that is addressed to her? How many men have I seen arriving here, their hearts filled with resentment and their eyes with tears! Some of them have just left a ball and want to find a woman who epitomizes all those they have just left behind; others, after getting married, are excited by the idea of innocence; and then there are the young men, eager to caress at their leisure the mistresses to whom they dare not speak, as they close their eyes and see her thus in their hearts; husbands who long to rejuvenate themselves and savour the easy pleasures of the good old days, priests driven by the devil and desiring not so much a woman as a courtesan, sin incarnate; they curse me, they take fright at me and then they adore me. For the temptation to be even greater and the fear more intense, they would like me to have a cloven hoof and my dress to sparkle with jewels. All of them pass along in monotonous and melancholy fashion, like shadows following one after another, like a throng which leaves behind only a faint echo, the fading of its urgent, hurrying footsteps, and the muffled clamour that it raised. And can I remember the name of a single one of them? They come and they go, leaving me behind, with never a disinterested caress – and what caresses they demand! They would demand love too, if they dared! You have to call them handsome and pretend they are rich: and then they smile. And they love to laugh, sometimes you have to sing for them, or else hold your tongue, or talk to them. In this woman, so familiar to everyone, nobody suspected there was a heart; imbeciles who praised the curve of my eyebrows and the dazzling whiteness of my shoulders, delighted that they could get a king’s ransom so cheaply – and never responding to that inextinguishable love that ran out to meet them and threw itself at their feet!

  “And yet I do come across women who have lovers, even here – real lovers who love them; these women grant them a place apart, in their beds as in their hearts, and when their lovers come to see them, they are really happy. It is for these men, you see, that they spend such a long time combing their hair and watering the pots of flowers in their window boxes; but for me there is nobody, nobody; not even the peaceful affection of a poor child, since they point her out to him – ‘that prostitute’ – and they pass by her with bowed heads. How long ago it is, my God, since I went out into the fields and saw the countryside! How many Sundays I have spent listening to the sound of those sad bells that summon everyone to the church services – which I never attend! How long it is since I heard the cowbells in the copse! Oh, I want to go away from here, I’m bored, bored; I’ll go back home on foot, I’ll go and see my nurse, she’s a good woman and she’ll give me a warm welcome. When I was small, I’d go to her house, where she gave me milk; now I’ll help her to raise her children and do the housework, I’ll go to fetch kindling wood in the forest, we’ll warm ourselves, in the evenings, by the fireside when it snows – winter will soon be here; on Twelfth Night we will pass the cake round to find the bean king. Oh, she’ll really love me, I’ll lull the children to sleep – how happy I’ll be!”

  She stopped, and then lifted to me her eyes that were gleaming through her tears, as if to ask me, “Is it you?”

  I had listened to her avidly, I had watched all the words on her lips, trying to identify with the life that they were expressing. Suddenly assuming a stature that, no doubt, I myself endowed her with, she struck me as a new woman, full of unknown mysteries and, in spite of my relationship with her, offering all the temptations of a provocative allure and novel charms. Indeed, the men who had possessed her had left on her, as it were, the whiff of a faded perfume, and the trace of long-gone passions, which gave her a voluptuous majesty; debauchery embellished her with an infernal beauty. Without her past orgies, would she have had that suicidal smile, which made her resemble a dead woman awakening to love? Her cheek was all the paler for it, her hair more supple and perfumed, her limbs more agile, softer and warmer; like me, she had made her way from joy to sorrow, run from hope to bitter disillusionment, and fits of indescribable despondency had succeeded spasms of frenzy; without knowing each other, we had followed the same path, she in her prostitution and I in my chastity – and this path had led to the same abyss; while I had been looking for a mistress, she had been looking for a lover, she in society, and I within my heart, and the objects of our desire had evaded us both.

  “Poor woman,” I said to her, pressing her to me, “how you must have suffered!”

  “Have you ever suffered anything similar, then?” she asked me. “Are you like me? Have you often drenched your pillow in tears? Are the days of winter sunshine just as sad for you too? When it is misty, in the evenings, and I am out walking by myself, it seems to me that the rain is falling through my heart and causing it to crumble into ruins.”

  “But,” I replied, “I doubt whether you have ever been as bored as I was in society – you had your days of pleasure, while for me it was as if I had been born in prison; there are countless things inside me that have never seen the light of day.”

  “And yet you are so young! It’s true: all men are old these days – children are as sated as old men, our mothers conceived us in a fit of boredom; people were different in olden times, weren’t they?”

  “Yes,” I replied, “the houses we live in are all the same, white and mournful like the tombs in cemeteries; in the old black hovels that they’re demolishing life must have been warmer; they sang their heads off, they smashed their tankards on the table, and they broke their bedsteads when they made love.”

  “But who has made you so unhappy? You must have been in love?”

  “Been in love?… My God, enough to envy your life!”

  “Envy my life?” she said.

  “Yes, envy it! After all, in your position I might have been happy, for if a man of the kind you desire doesn’t exist anywhere, a woman of the kind I want must exist somewhere; among so many throbbing hearts there must be one for me.”

  “Then look for it! Look for it!”

  “Oh, have I ever been in love?… So much so that I am saturated with repressed desires. No, you’ll never know how many women have led me astray, whom in the depths of my heart I sh
eltered with an angelic love. Listen: when I had experienced a day in the company of a woman, I would say to myself, ‘If only I had known her for ten years! All those days of her life that I never even experienced in fact belonged to me; her first smile should have been for me, her first thought ever, for me. People come here and speak to her, she replies, she thinks about them… I should have read the books she admires. Why didn’t I go out walking with her, beneath all the trees that sheltered her in their shade? There are so many dresses that she has worn out and that I never saw; in her life she has heard the most beautiful operas and I wasn’t there; other men have already let her smell flowers that I did not pluck; I can’t do anything about it, she will forget me, I am in her eyes just another passer-by in the street,’ And when I was separated from her, I would say to myself, ‘Where is she? What does she do, all day long, away from me? What does she spend her time in doing?’ When a woman loves a man, she need only give him a signal, and he falls at her feet! But for us men, it’s a matter of chance whether she even deigns to glance at us, and even then!… You have to be rich, possess horses to ride off on, own a house adorned with statues, give parties, throw money around, and make a noise; but as for living as one of the crowd, unable to dominate it by genius or wealth, and to remain thus as unknown as the most cowardly and stupid man of all, when you aspire to heavenly loves, when you would gladly die under the gaze of a beloved woman… that is a torment that I have known.”