He abandons his home and to expiate his crime decides to devote his life to the service of others. He tends the sick and dying, and spends many years caring for a repulsive leper, until finally the leper is revealed to be Jesus Christ. Julian dies and is transported to heaven, his early crimes obviously redeemed by his subsequent saintly life. In the last sentence of the tale the narrator laconically reminds us that this is a legend, the details of which are depicted in a stained-glass window in the wall of a church near his home. There is in fact a window in Rouen Cathedral that tells this story.
The final story, ‘Herodias’, deals with the last days of John the Baptist, as related in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, set against the background of the politics of contemporary Palestine. Herodias throws a birthday banquet for her second husband, Herod Antipas. She schemes to have her husband fall in love with her daughter by her first marriage, Salomé, as part of a plan to kill John the Baptist. Salomé dances for Herod and, infatuated, he promises her whatever she wants: she demands John’s head on a salver, which he accordingly gives her, although very reluctantly. Following John’s execution, his followers set off into the desert to await the Messiah whose coming the ancient prophets and John have foretold.
Like the legend of St Julian, Salomé’s dance is depicted on a window in Rouen Cathedral, and it was possibly from this image that Flaubert derived his inspiration for this story set in biblical times.
Flaubert returned to the novel that was to become Bouvard and Pécuchet in 1877, although it remained unfinished at the time of his death in May 1880. Even without the eighteen-month break, during which he wrote Three Tales, Flaubert took over six years to write fewer than ten chapters of what was apparently intended to be a very long philosophical novel, possibly indicating that he was finding it more and more difficult to write as a result of his deteriorating health.
The original inspiration for this work seems to have been a humorous novel by Barthélemy Maurice entitled Les Deux Greffiers (The Two Court Clerks), in which two court copyists, having spent their entire lives in their boring occupation, devote their retirement to the attempt to find the meaning of life. They step back from their endeavour on the edge of madness, and decide to resume their old, rather boring life, having realized that, tedious though it is, they enjoy it. But, inevitably, Flaubert, having adopted this idea, resolved to make his own work based on it extremely long, realistic and philosophical. He once declared he was going to write an angry book against human stupidity.
Like Madame Bovary, Bouvard and Pécuchet is set in modern Normandy. Its titular protagonists work as legal copyists in different parts of the town. They are middle-aged, unmarried mediocrities. They meet by chance, become friendly, and, when one inherits a fortune, decide to retire and engage in intense study of all fields of human endeavour, delving profoundly into questions such as the meaning of life, the existence of God and other knotty subtleties.
Yet they talk in clichés and are physically inept and clumsy. They drift from one subject to another: philosophy, metaphysics, medicine, politics, religion, geology, physiology, natural sciences, literature, aesthetics – indeed, the whole spectrum of human knowledge. They begin to infuriate the people of Chavignolles in Normandy, where they have settled, as, full of their own superficial learning and inflated notions, they pass judgement on what they perceive as the coarseness and obtuseness of those around them.
The surviving notes and plans do not make it clear how the novel would have continued. However, according to Flaubert’s notes, at least one plan was for their neighbours to force Bouvard and Pécuchet out of the area or have them committed, and for Bouvard and Pécuchet to return to their former occupation. It is also possible that Flaubert intended to add to the novel as an appendix a separate work entitled The Dictionary of Received Ideas, an encyclopedia of platitudes and clichés designed to satirize bourgeois French society that the author compiled throughout the 1870s. The latter work was eventually published separately many years later.
What had been completed of Bouvard and Pécuchet was published in instalments in literary journals shortly after Flaubert’s death.
Select Bibliography
Standard Editions:
The most authoritative editions of Flaubert’s works in the original French are the two-volume Œuvres complètes, published by Éditions du Seuil, Paris, in 1964, and the sixteen-volume edition of the same name, published by Club de l’Honnête Homme, Paris, from 1971 onwards. The latter edition contains Flaubert’s complete correspondence as well as unedited manuscripts.
Biographies:
Bart, Benjamin F., Flaubert (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1967)
Lottman, Herbert R., Flaubert: A Biography (London: Methuen, 1989)
Oliver, Hermia, Flaubert and an English Governess: The Quest for Juliet Herbert (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980)
Sartre, Jean-Paul, The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert 1821–1857, tr. Carol Cosman, 5 vols. (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981–1993)
Spencer, Philip, Flaubert: A Biography (London: Faber, 1952)
Starkie, Enid, Flaubert: The Making of the Master (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967)
Starkie Enid, Flaubert the Master (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971)
Wall, Geoffrey, Flaubert: A Life (London: Faber, 2001)
Additional Recommended Background Material:
Barnes, Julian, Flaubert’s Parrot (London: Jonathan Cape, 1984)
Barnes, Julian, Something to Declare (London: Picador, 2002)
Bart, Benjamin F., ed., Madame Bovary and the Critics (New York, NY: New York University Press, 1966)
(New York, NY, and Philadelphia, PA: Chelsea House, 1988)
Brombert, Victor, The Novels of Flaubert (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966)
Heath, Stephen, Flaubert: Madame Bovary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)
LaCapra, Dominick, Madame Bovary on Trial (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1982)
Lloyd, Rosemary, Madame Bovary (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989)
Lowe, Margaret, Towards the Real Flaubert: A Study of Madame Bovary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984)
Roe, David, Gustave Flaubert (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989)
Steegmuller, Francis, Flaubert and Madame Bovary (London: Macmillan, 1968)
Tillett, Margaret G., On Reading Flaubert (London: Oxford University Press, 1961)
Unwin, Timothy, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Flaubert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)
Vargas Llosa, Mario, The Perpetual Orgy (London and Boston, NY: Faber, 1987)
On the Web:
www.univ-rouen.fr/flaubert
perso.wanadoo.fr/jb.guinot/pages/accueil.html
Table of Contents
Introduction
Memoirs of a Madman
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
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23
November
Note on the Texts
Notes
Extra Material
Gustave Flaubert’s Life
Gustave Flaubert’s Works
Select Bibliography
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