Memoirs of a Madman and November

by Gustave Flaubert

  “You’re shy, aren’t you? You’re scared of women.”

  “Not any more. Before, even the sound of their footsteps made me shudder, I would stand outside the hairdresser’s shop gazing at the lovely wax heads with flowers and diamonds in their hair, all pink and white, with low-cut dresses; I fell in love with some of them. The display in a cobbler’s shop would also keep me in raptures: in those little satin shoes, that were going to be taken away and worn at the evening ball, I would set a bare foot, a charming foot, with fine toenails, a foot of living alabaster, like that of a princess climbing into her bath; the corsets hanging outside fashion shops, and swaying in the wind, also filled me with bizarre longings; I offered bunches of flowers to women I didn’t love, hoping that love would subsequently come along, as I had heard it might; I wrote letters addressed to someone quite insignificant, so that I could force myself to feel something by writing it down – and I wept; the least smile from a woman’s mouth made my heart melt with delight, and then – nothing! So much happiness was not for me; who could ever love me?”

  “Wait! Wait for one more year, for six months! Tomorrow perhaps – just keep hoping!”

  “I have hoped too intensely ever to get what I hoped for.”

  “You’re talking like a child,” she told me.

  “No, I cannot imagine there’s even a love with which I would not be sated after twenty-four hours; I have dreamt of the feeling for so long that I am tired of it, like all those people one has cherished too intensely.”

  “But it’s the only beautiful thing in the world.”

  “You’re telling me that? I’d give anything to spend a single night with a woman who would love me.”

  “Oh, if only, instead of hiding your heart away, you openly showed all the noble, kindly feelings that throb within it, every woman would be after you, they would all unfailingly strive to be your mistress; but you have been even crazier than me! Does anyone ever waste time over buried treasures? Only coquettes guess what people like you are really like, and they torture them: the others don’t even see them. And yet you were well worth someone’s love! Anyway, so much the better! I’m the one who will love you, I’m the one who will be your mistress.”

  “My mistress?”

  “Oh yes – please! I’ll follow you wherever you want to go, I’ll rent a room opposite yours, I’ll gaze at you all the day long. I’ll love you so much! To be with you, morning and evening, to sleep together at night, our arms wrapped round each other, to eat at the same table, facing one another, to get dressed in the same room, to go out together, and to feel you next to me! Aren’t we made for one another? Don’t your hopes go together with my bitter disillusionments? Your life and mine are just the same, aren’t they? You’ll tell me about all the trials and tribulations of your solitude, I will relate yet again the torments I have endured; we’ll need to live as if we were only going to stay together for just one hour, exhaust all the pleasure and tenderness within us, and then begin all over again, and die together. Kiss me, kiss me again! Put your head just there on my breast, let me feel its weight, let your hair caress my neck, let my hands wander over your shoulders – you have such gentle eyes!”

  The rumpled blanket, hanging to the ground, had left our feet bare; she rose to her knees and tucked it back under the mattress, and I saw her white back curving like a reed; our sleepless night had broken me; my forehead was heavy, my eyes so tired the eyelids smarted; she grazed them gently with a kiss, and this refreshed them as well as if they had been moistened with cold water. She too began to arouse herself more and more from the torpor into which she had for a moment subsided; aggravated by her fatigue, and inflamed by the taste of our previous caresses, she clasped me to her with desperate sensuality, telling me, “Let’s love one another, since nobody else has loved us – you are mine!”

  She was panting, her mouth open, and kissing me with furious ardour; then, suddenly, she mastered her emotion, ran her hands through her ruffled hair, and added:

  “Listen, how lovely our life would be if it could be like that, if we could go off to a land where yellow flowers grow in the sunshine and oranges ripen, on a shore – they do exist, apparently – where the sand is completely white, where the men wear turbans, and the women have dresses of gauze; we would lie at length under some great tree with its broad leaves, we would listen to the waves breaking on the curved shore, we would walk together by the side of the sea picking up seashells, I would weave baskets with reeds, and you would go off to sell them; I would dress you, I would curl your hair in my fingers, I’d place a necklace round your neck, oh! How I would love you! How I do love you! So let me drink my fill of you!”

  Pinning me to her bed, with an impetuous movement, she flung her full length on my body and stretched her limbs out with an obscene, pale and quivering joy, her teeth clenched, and clutching me to her with a crazed strength; I felt as if I were being dragged into some hurricane of love, in which sobs and then piercing cries broke out; my lips, moist with her saliva, foamed and twitched; our muscles, locked into the same clench, clasped one another, knotted together as pleasure turned into delirium and ecstasy into torment.

  Suddenly opening her eyes in a look of blank astonishment and alarm, she said:

  “What if I were to have a child!”

  And then, taking the contrary tack and becoming wheedling and imploring:

  “Yes, yes, a child! A child from you!… You’re leaving me? We’ll never see each other again, you’ll never return, will you think of me sometimes? I’ll always have a lock of your hair here: farewell!… Wait, it’s hardly even daylight.”

  So why was I in such a hurry to get away from her? Did I already love her?

  Marie said nothing more to me, although I stayed with her a good half-hour longer; she was perhaps thinking about her absent lover. There comes a moment, when we are separating, in which our sadness makes its presence felt in advance, and the beloved person is no longer with us.

  We didn’t say farewell; I took her hand, and she responded, but the strength she needed to grasp it had remained locked within her heart.

  I never saw her again.

  I have thought of her since, and not a day has gone by on which I have not wasted the greatest number of hours possible dreaming of her; sometimes I deliberately shut myself away, alone, and try to relive this memory; often I force myself to think about her before going to sleep, to dream of her at night – but that happiness has never been mine.

  I sought her everywhere, out walking, at the theatre, at street corners, not knowing why I thought she would write to me; whenever I heard a carriage stop at my front door, I imagined she was about to get out. With what anguish did I follow certain women! With what a beating heart did I turn my head to see if it was her!

  The house has been demolished, and no one has ever been able to tell me what became of her.

  The desire for a woman one has obtained is something atrocious, a thousand times worse than the other desire: terrible images pursue you like a remorse. I am not jealous of the men who had her before me, but I am jealous of those who have had her since; a tacit convention had decreed, it seems to me, that we should remain faithful to one another; for over a year I remained faithful to that agreement, and then chance, boredom and perhaps weariness with the same emotions led me to break it. But she was the one I pursued everywhere; in the beds of other women, I dreamt of her caresses.

  However much one tries to sow new passions in the place where the old passions had grown, the old ones keep reappearing, and there is nothing in the world strong enough to tear them up by the root. Roman roads, along which the chariots of consuls used to roll, have long since fallen into disuse, and countless new tracks cut across them; fields have risen over them, and corn now grows on them, but you can still see the trace they left, and their great stones can still inflict dents on farmers’ ploughs.

  The type of woman which almost all men seek is perhaps merely the memory of a love conceived in heaven, or
in the first days of life; we seek everything even vaguely linked to it, and the second woman you fancy almost always resembles the first; you need a high degree of corruption or a very big heart to love absolutely everything. Look, too, at how it is always the same women who are spoken of by the men who write books – women that they describe a hundred times over without ever wearying. I knew a friend who had, at the age of fifteen, adored a young mother whom he had seen breastfeeding her child; for a long time he admired only women with nice plump figures; the beauty of slender women filled him with aversion.

  As time went by, I loved her more and more; with the furious desire one has for impossible things, I concocted adventures that would enable me to find her again, and imagined our encounter; I recognized her eyes in the blue globules of rivers, and the colour of her face in the leaves of the aspen, when tinged with autumnal colours. Once, I was walking swiftly across a meadow, and the grass was swishing around my feet as I advanced; she was behind me. I turned round, there was no one there. Another day, a carriage passed in front of me, I looked up, a great white veil was dangling out of the window and fluttering in the wind, the wheels were turning, it twisted, called out to me, and disappeared; and I remained alone, distraught, more abandoned than if I had been at the bottom of a precipice.

  Oh, if only we could extract everything there is inside us and create a person through the force of mere thought! If only we could grasp our phantom in our hands and touch its forehead, instead of wasting so many caresses and so many sighs on the empty air! Far from it: memory forgets and the image fades, while the pain persists grimly inside you. It was in order to remind myself of this fact that I have written the above, hoping that the words would enable me to relive it – I have failed; I know so much more than I have said.

  In any case, it’s a secret that I have told to no one – they’d have made fun of me. After all, they always mock those who love; it is a source of shame among men; everyone, either from modesty or egotism, hides away the best and most delicate of his soul’s possessions; to gain the esteem of others, we must only ever show our ugliest sides; this is how we keep ourselves on the common level. “You loved a woman like that?” they’d have said to me, and at first no one would have understood; so what would have been the point of opening my mouth?

  They’d have been right; perhaps she was neither more beautiful nor more ardent than any other; I am afraid of loving something that is no more than a notion dreamt up by my mind, and of cherishing in her nothing other than the love of which she made me dream.

  I struggled for a long time against this thought – that I had placed love on too high a pedestal to hope that it would come down to my level; but, from the persistence of this idea, I was forced to acknowledge that it was indeed something analogous. It was only a few months after leaving her that I felt it; to begin with, on the contrary, I lived in a state of great calm.

  How empty the world is when you walk through it alone! What would I do in it? How would I spend my time? On what would I employ my intelligence? How long the days are! Where, then, is the man who complains of the brevity of the days of our life? Let them show him to me; he must be a happy mortal.

  Take your mind off things, they say – but by doing what? They may as well say: try to be happy. How? And what’s the use of all that agitation? Everything in nature is good: trees grow, rivers flow, birds sing, stars shine; but man in his torment twists and turns, rushes around, cuts down forests, overturns the earth, launches out to sea, travels, runs, kills animals, kills himself, perhaps, and weeps, and roars, and thinks about hell, as if God had given him a mind to conceive even more evils than those he endures!

  In days gone by, before Marie, there was something fine and grand in my intense boredom; but now it is merely stupid – the boredom of a man sozzled with cheap brandy, asleep, dead drunk.

  Those who have experienced a great deal are not the same. At the age of fifty, they are fresher than I was at twenty, and everything strikes them as still new and attractive. Will I be like those useless nags who are tired no sooner than they are out of the stable, and who trot at ease only after they have gone a fair bit of the way, having at first limped painfully along? Too many sights make me feel ill, and too many others fill me with pity – or rather, they all merge into the same disgust.

  The man who is well born and so doesn’t want a mistress (since he couldn’t lavish diamonds on her, or house her in a palace), and who witnesses vulgar love affairs and calmly contemplates the imbecilic ugliness of those two rutting animals called a lover and his mistress, is not tempted to lower himself to their level; he wards off love as if it were a frailty, and he crushes beneath his knees all the desires that assail him; the struggle exhausts him. The cynical egotism of men makes me shun them, just as the narrow minds of women put me completely off their society; I am wrong, after all, since two lovely lips are worth more than all the eloquence in the world.

  A fallen leaf flutters and flies off in the wind, and I too would like to fly away, far away, never to return, anywhere, so long as I could leave my own country; my home weighs me down, I have gone in and come out so often through the same door! I have raised my eyes so often to the same place, my bedroom ceiling – which ought by now to have been quite worn away by my gaze.

  Oh, to feel yourself hunched on a camel’s back! Before you there spreads a broad red sky, and expanses of uniform brown sand; a flaming horizon stretches away into the distance over the undulating terrain, and an eagle soars over your head; in one spot is a muster of storks with pink feet passing by on their way to the wells; the ship of the desert rocks you on its back, the sun makes you close your eyes and bathes you in its beams, you can hear nothing but the muffled tread of your mounts, the driver has just finished his song, on you go, on and on. In the evenings you push in the poles and pitch tent, you give the dromedaries a drink, you lie down on a lion skin, you have a smoke, you light fires to ward off the jackals you can hear yelping far away in the desert, unknown stars four times as big as ours twinkle in the sky; in the morning, you fill your water skins at the oasis, you set off again, all alone, the wind whistles and the sand swirls up.

  And then, in some plain through which you gallop all day long, palm trees rise between the columns and gently wave their foliage, next to the immobile shade of ruined temples; goats climb over the collapsed façades and nibble at the plants that have grown up among the embossed blocks of marble; they bound away when you draw near. Beyond that, after crossing forests in which the trees are woven together by gigantic creepers, and rivers whose other shores cannot be seen, lies the Sudan, the land of Negroes, the land of gold; but even farther – oh! – let’s keep going, I want to see fiery Malabar and its dances, which often end in death; the wines are as murderous as poisons, and the poisons as sweet as wines; the sea, a blue sea filled with coral and pearls, resounds to the tumult of the sacred orgies that take place in mountain caverns; you have left any haziness behind, the atmosphere here is crimson, the cloudless sky is mirrored in the warm ocean, the cables steam when you lift them out of the water, sharks follow after the ship and eat the dead.

  Oh, India! India above all! White mountains, filled with pagodas and idols, in the middle of woods swarming with tigers and elephants, yellow men with white costumes, women the colour of tin with rings on their hands and feet, gauze dresses that swathe them like a vapour, and eyes of which all you can see are the lids blackened with henna; together they sing a hymn to some god, and dance… Dance, dance, dancing girl, daughter of the Ganges, let your feet spin in my head! Like a snake she bends backwards, lets her arms hang loose, her head sways, her hips swing, her nostrils flare, her hair falls around her, the smoking incense rises up on every side of the stupid gilded idol with its four heads and twenty arms.

  In a small boat of cedar wood – a long boat, whose slender oars resemble feathers – under a veil made of woven bamboo, to the sound of tam-tams and tambourines, I will go to the yellow country they call China; you can hold wo
men’s feet in your hands, their heads are small, and their eyebrows slender and rise at the corners; they live in arbours of green reeds and eat velvet-skinned fruits off painted porcelain. A mandarin, with his pointed moustache falling down onto his chest, his head shaven, with a topknot that comes right down his back, and a round fan in his fingers, strolls through his gallery, where the tripods are burning, and places his feet slowly on the mats of rice; a little pipe is stuck through his pointed hat, and black Chinese characters are printed on his red silk clothes. Oh, how far I have travelled on the back of a tea chest!

  Carry me away, tempests of the New World – you uproot age-old oaks and stir up the lakes where serpents frolic in the waves! May the mountain torrents of Norway cover me with their foam! May the snow of Siberia, which falls in thick dense heaps, cover my route! Oh, to travel, to travel, never stopping, and, in this immense waltz, to see everything appearing and vanishing away, until your skin cracks open and the blood spurts forth!

  Let valleys follow mountains, fields follow cities, and plains follow seas. Let us go up and down the hillsides, let the spires of cathedrals disappear, as have the masts of the serried vessels in the harbours; let us listen to the cascades falling on the rocks, the winds sweeping through the forests and the glaciers melting in the sunlight; let me see Arab horsemen galloping along, and women borne on palanquins; and then domes arching and pyramids rising into the skies, stifling underground chambers where mummies slumber, narrow defiles where the brigand loads his weapon, rush-filled expanses in which the rattlesnake hides, striped zebras running through the tall grass, kangaroos perched on their hind legs, monkeys swaying from the branches of coconut trees, tigers pouncing on their prey, gazelles fleeing from them…

  On, on! Let us sail over the wide oceans, where whales and cachalots are at war. Look: along comes, like some great sea bird beating its two wings, across the waves, the dugout canoe of the savages; bloody scalps hang from their prow, and they have painted their ribs red; their lips are split, their faces daubed, their noses pierced with rings, and they howl out their death chant; their green-tipped arrows are poisoned, so that you die in agony; their naked wives, with tattooed breasts and hands, raise great pyres for the victims of their menfolk, who have promised them white man’s flesh that melts so nicely in the mouth.