Lectures on Literature

by Nabokov, Vladimir

  " 'Thus we,' he said, 'why did we come to know one another? What chance willed it? It was because across the infinite, like two streams that flow but to unite, our special bents of mind had driven us towards each other,'

  "And he seized her hand; she did not withdraw it.

  " 'For good farming generally!' cried the president.

  " 'Just now, for example, when I went to your house—'

  " 'To Monsieur Bizet of Quincampoix.'

  " '—did I know I should accompany you?'

  " 'Seventy francs.'

  " 'A hundred times I wished to go; and I followed you—I remained.'

  " 'Manures!'

  " 'And I shall remain to-night, to-morrow, all other days, all my life!'

  " 'To Monsieur Caron of Argueil, a gold medal!'

  " 'For I have never in the society of any other person found so complete a charm.'

  " 'To Monsieur Bain of Givry-Saint-Martin.'

  " 'And I shall carry away with me the remembrance of you.'

  " 'For a merino ram!'

  " 'But you will forget me; I shall pass away like a shadow.'

  " ‘To Monsieur Belot of Notre-Dame.'

  " Oh, do say no! I shall be something in your thought, in your life, shall I not?'

  " 'Porcine race; prizes—equal, to Messrs. Leherisse and Cullembourg, sixty francs!'

  "Rodolphe was pressing her hand, and he felt it all warm and quivering like a captive dove that wants to continue its flight; but, whether she was trying to take it away or whether she was answering his pressure, she made a movement with her fingers. He exclaimed—

  " 'Oh, I thank you! You do not repulse me! You are good! You understand that I am yours! Let me look at you; let me contemplate you!'

  "A gust of wind that blew in at the window ruffled the cloth on the table, and in the square below all the great caps of the peasant women were uplifted by it like the wings of white butterflies fluttering.

  " 'Use of oil-cakes,' continued the president. He was hurrying on: 'Flemish manure—flax-growing—drainage—long leases—domestic service.' "

  The fourth movement begins here when both fall silent and the words from the platform where a special prize is now being awarded are heard in full, with commentary: ''Rodolphe was no longer speaking. They looked at one another. A supreme desire made their dry lips tremble, and softly, without an effort, their fingers intertwined.

  " 'Catherine Nicaise Elizabeth Leroux, of Sassetot-Ia-Guerriere, for fifty-four years of service at the same farm, a silver medal—value, twenty-five francs!' ...

  "Then there came forward on the platform a little old woman with timid bearing, who seemed to shrink within her poor clothes.... Something of monastic rigidity dignified her face. Nothing of sadness or of emotion weakened that pale look. In her constant proximity to cattle she had caught their dumbness and their calm.... Thus stood before these beaming bourgeois this half-century of servitude....

  " 'Approach! approach!'

  " 'Are you deaf?' said Tuvache, jumping up in his armchair; and he began shouting in her ear, 'Fifty-four years in service. A silver medal! Twenty-five francs! For you!'

  "Then, when she had her medal, she looked at it, and a smile of beatitude spread over her face; and as she walked away they could hear her muttering—

  " 'I'll give it to our cure up home, to say some masses for me!'

  " 'What fanaticism!' exclaimed the druggist, leaning across to the notary."

  The apotheosis to this splendid contrapuntal chapter is Homais's account in the Rouen paper of the show and banquet: " 'Why these festoons, these flowers, these garlands? Whither hurries this crowd like the waves of a furious sea under the torrents of a tropical sun pouring its heat upon our meads?' ...

  "He cited himself among the first of the members of the jury, and he even called attention in a note to the fact that Monsieur Homais, druggist, had sent a memoir on cider to the agricultural society. When he came to the distribution of the prizes, he painted the joy of the prize-winners in dithyrambic strophes. 'The father embraced the son, the brother the brother, the husband his consort. More than one showed his humble medal with pride, and no doubt when he got home to his good housewife, he hung it up weeping on the modest walls of his cot.

  " 'About six o'clock a banquet prepared in the grass-plot of Monsieur Liegeard brought together the principal personages of the festivity. The greatest cordiality reigned here. Divers toasts were proposed: Monsieur Lieuvain, the King; Monsieur Tuvache, the Prefect; Monsieur Derozerays, Agriculture; Monsieur Homais, Industry and the Fine Arts, those twin sisters; Monsieur Leplichey, Ameliorations. In the evening some brilliant fireworks on a sudden illumined the air. One would have called it a veritable kaleidoscope, a real operatic scene; and for a moment our little locality might have thought itself transported into the midst of a dream of the "Thousand and One Nights." ' "

  In a way, Industry and the Fine Arts, those twin sisters, symbolize the hog breeders and the tender couple in a kind of farcical synthesis. This is a wonderful chapter. It has had an enormous influence on James Joyce; and I do not think that, despite superficial innovations, Joyce has gone any further than Flaubert.

  Nabokov's list of mistranslated words in the Aveling translation of Madame Bovary

  "Today ... a man and a woman, lover and mistress in one [in thought], I have been riding on horseback through a wood, on an autumn afternoon, under yellow leaves, and I was the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words that were exchanged and the crimson sun ... and my two lovers." So Flaubert on 23 December 1853, to Louise Colet, about the famous chapter 9 of the second part, Rodolphe's seduction of Emma.

  Within the general frame and scheme of the nineteenth-century novel, this kind of scene was technically known as a woman's fall, the fall of virtue. In the course of this delightfully written scene the behavior of Emma's long blue veil—a character in its own serpentine right—is especially to be marked.[*] After dismounting from their horses, they walk. "Then some hundred paces farther on she again stopped, and through her veil, that fell slantingly from her man's hat over her hips, her face appeared in a bluish transparency as if she were floating under azure waves." So, when she is daydreaming about the event in her room on their return: "Then she saw herself in the glass and wondered at her face. Never had her eyes been so large, so black, of so profound a depth. Something subtle about her being transfigured her. She repeated, 'I have a lover! a lover!' delighting at the idea as if a second puberty had come to her. So at last she was to know those joys of love, that fever of happiness of which she had despaired! She was entering upon marvels where all would be passion, ecstasy, delirium. An azure infinity encompassed her, the heights of sentiment sparkled under her thought, and ordinary existence appeared only afar off, down below in the darkness in the interspaces of these heights." And one should not forget that, later, the poisonous arsenic was in a blue jar—and the blue haze that hung about the countryside at her funeral.

  The event itself that gave rise to her daydreaming is briefly described but with one most significant detail: "The cloth of her habit caught against the velvet of his coat. She threw back her white neck, swelling with a sigh, and faltering, in tears, with a long shudder and hiding her face, she gave herself up to him.

  "The shades of night were falling; the horizontal sun passing between the branches dazzled her eyes. Here and there around her, in the leaves or on the ground, trembled luminous patches, as if humming-birds in flight[*] had scattered their feathers. Silence was everywhere; a mild something seemed to come forth from the trees; she felt her heart, whose beating had begun again, and the blood coursing through her flesh like a stream of milk. Then far away, beyond the wood, on the other hills, she heard a vague prolonged cry, a voice which lingered, and in silence she heard it mingling like music with the last pulsations of her throbbing nerves. Rodolphe, a cigar in his teeth, was mending with his penknife one of the bridles that had broken."

  When Emma has returned from love's swoon, you wi
ll please mark the remote note that reaches her from somewhere beyond the quiet woods—a musical moan in the distance—for all its enchantment is nothing but the glorified echo of a hideous vagabond's raucous song. And presently Emma and Rodolphe come back from their ride—with a smile on the face of the author. For that raucous song here and in Rouen will hideously mingle with Emma's death rattle less than five years later.

  Following the end of Emma's affair with Rodolphe in which he jilts her at the very moment she expected him to elope with her into the blue mist of her romantic dreams, two associated scenes are written in Flaubert's favorite contrapuntal structure. The first is the night at the opera Lucia di Lammermoor when Emma meets Léon again after his return from Paris. The elegant young men she notices parading in the pit of the opera house, leaning with the palms of their gloved hands on the glossy knob of their canes, form an introduction to the preliminary hubbub of various instruments getting ready to play.

  In the first movement of the scene Emma is intoxicated with the tenor's melodious lamentations, which remind her of her love for Rodolphe long gone. Charles interrupts the music of her mood by his matter-of-fact remarks. He sees the opera as a jumble of idiotic gestures, but she understands the plot because she has read the novel in French. In the second, she follows the fate of Lucy on the stage while her thoughts dwell upon her own fate. She identifies herself with the girl on the stage and is ready to be made love to by anybody whom she may identify with the tenor. But in the third movement the roles are reversed. It is the opera, the singing, that creates the unwelcome interruptions, and it is her conversation with Léon that is the real thing. Charles was beginning to enjoy himself when he is dragged away to a cafe. Fourthly, Léon suggests that she come back on Sunday to see the last scene they had missed. The equations are truly schematic: for Emma the opera at first equals reality; the singer initially is Rodolphe, and then he is himself, Lagardy, a possible lover; the possible lover becomes Léon; and finally Léon is equated with reality and she loses interest in the opera in order to go with him to a cafe to escape the heat of the opera house.

  Another example of the counterpoint theme is the cathedral episode. We have some preliminary sparring when Léon calls upon Emma at the inn before we come to their assignation in the cathedral. This preliminary conversation echoes that with Rodolphe at the county fair but this time Emma is far more sophisticated. In the first movement of the cathedral scene Léon enters the church to wait for Emma. The interplay is now between the beadle in his janitor's uniform (the permanent guide in wait for sightseers) on the one hand and Léon who does not want to see the sights. What he does see of the cathedral—the iridescent light dappling the floor and so on—is in keeping with his concentration upon Emma, whom he visualizes as the jealously guarded Spanish ladies sung by the French poet Musset who go to church and there pass love messages to their cavaliers. The beadle is boiling with anger at seeing a potential sightseer taking the liberty of admiring the church by himself.

  The second movement is inaugurated when Emma enters, abruptly thrusts a paper at Léon (a letter of renunciation), and goes into the chapel of the Virgin to pray. "She rose, and they were about to leave, when the beadle came forward, hurriedly saying—

  " 'Madame, no doubt, does not belong to these parts? Madame would like to see the curiosities of the church?'

  " 'Oh, no!' cried the clerk.

  " 'Why not?' said she. For she clung with her expiring virtue to the Virgin, the sculptures, the tombs—anything."

  Now the torrent of the beadle's descriptive eloquence runs parallel to the impatient storm in Léon's mood. The beadle is about to show them, of all things, the steeple when Léon rushes Emma out of the church. But, thirdly, when they have already reached the outside, the beadle manages again to interfere by bringing out a pile of large bound volumes for sale, all about the cathedral. Finally, the frantic Léon tries to find a cab and then tries to get Emma into the cab. It is done in Paris, he responds when she demurs—to her the Paris of the green-silk cigar case—and this, as an irresistible argument, decides her. "Still the cab did not come. Léon was afraid she might go back into the church. At last the cab appeared.

  " 'At least go out by the north porch,' cried the beadle, who was left alone on the threshold, 'so as to see the Resurrection, the Last Judgment, Paradise, King David, and the Condemned in Hell-flames.'

  " 'Where to, sir?' asked the coachman.

  " 'Where you like,' said Léon, forcing Emma into the cab.

  "And the lumbering contraption set out.''

  Just as the agricultural subjects (the hogs and the manure) at the fair foreshadowed the mud that the boy Justin cleans off Emma's shoes after her walks to the house of her lover Rodolphe, so the last gust of the beadle's parrotlike eloquence foreshadows the hell flames which Emma might still have escaped had she not stepped into that cab with Léon.

  This ends the cathedral part of the counterpoint. It is echoed in the next scene of the closed cab.[*] Here again the first idea on the coachman's part is to show the couple, whom in the simplicity of his uninformed mind he takes for tourists, the sights of Rouen, a poet's statue for instance. Then there is an automatic attempt on the cabby's part to drive jauntily up to the station, and there are other attempts of the same nature. But every time he is told by a voice from the mysterious inside of his cab to drive on. There is no need to go into the details of this remarkably amusing carriage drive, for a quotation will speak for itself. Yet one must remark that a grotesque hackney cab, with its window shades drawn, circulating in the full sight of the Rouen citizens is a far cry from that ride in the tawny woods over the purple heather with Rodolphe. Emma's adultery is cheapening. "And the lumbering contraption set out. It went down the Rue Grand-Pont, crossed the Place des Arts, the Quai Napoléon, the Pont Neuf, and stopped short before the statue of Pierre Corneille.

  " 'Go on,' cried a voice that came from within.

  "The cab went on again, and as soon as it reached the Carrefour Lafayette, set off down-hill, and entered the station at a gallop.

  " 'No, straight on!' cried the same voice.

  "The cab came out by the gate, and soon having reached the Cours, trotted quietly beneath the elm trees. The coachman wiped his brow, put his leather hat between his knees, and drove his carriage beyond the side alley by the turfy margin of the waters....

  "But suddenly it turned with a dash across Quatremares, Sotteville, La Grande-Chausée, the Rue d'Elbeuf, and made its third halt in front of the Jardin des Plantes.

  " 'Get on, will you?' cried the voice more furiously.

  "And at once resuming its course, it passed by Saint-Sever.... It went up the Boulevard Bouvreuil, along the Boulevard Cauchoise, then the whole of Mont-Riboudet to the Deville hills.

  "It came back; and then, without any fixed plan or direction, wandered about at hazard. The cab was seen at Saint-Pol, at Lescure, at Mont Gargan, at La Rougue-Marc and Place du Gaillardbois; in the Rue Maladrerie, Rue Dinanderie, before Saint-Romain, Saint-Vivien, Saint-Maclou, Saint-Nicaise—in front of the Customs, at the 'Veille Tour,' the 'Trois Pipes,' and the Monumental Cemetery. From time to time the coachman on his box cast despairing eyes at the public-houses. He could not understand what furious desire for locomotion urged these individuals never to wish to stop. He tried to now and then, and at once exclamations of anger burst forth from behind him. Then he lashed his perspiring jades afresh, and drove on, indifferent to the jolting, scraping against things here and there, not caring if he did, demoralized, and almost weeping with thirst, fatigue, and depression.

  "And on the harbor, in the midst of the drays and casks, and in the streets, at the corners, the good folk opened large wonder-stricken eyes at this sight, so extraordinary in the provinces, a cab with blinds drawn, and which reappeared thus constantly, shut more closely than a tomb, and tossing about like a ship.

  "Once in the middle of the day, in the open country, just as the sun beat most fiercely against the old plated lanterns, an ungl
oved hand passed beneath the small blinds of yellow canvas, and threw out some scraps of torn paper that scattered in the wind, and farther off alighted, like white butterflies, on a field of red clover all in bloom. [This was the negative letter Emma had given to Léon in the cathedral.]

  "At about six o'clock the carriage stopped in a back street of the Beauvoisine Quarter, and a woman got out, who walked with her veil down, and without turning her head."

  On her return to Yonville Emma is met by her maid, who brings a message that she is required at once at the house of Monsieur Homais. There is a curious atmosphere of disaster as she enters the pharmacy—for instance the first thing she sees is the great armchair lying on its back, overturned—however, the disorder is only due to the fact that the Homais family is furiously making jam. Emma is vaguely worried about the message; Homais, however, has completely forgotten what he wants to tell her. It later transpires that he had been asked by Charles to inform Emma, with all sorts of precautions, of her father-in-law's death, a piece of news she receives with the utmost indifference when Homais does blurt it out at the end of his furious monologue directed against little Justin, who having been told to fetch an additional pan for the jam, took one from the lumber room in the dangerous neighborhood of a blue jar with arsenic. The subtle part of this wonderful scene is that the real message, the real information given to Emma and impressed on her mind is the fact of the existence of that jar of poison, of the place where it is, of the key to the room that little Justin has; and although at this moment she is in a delicious daze of adultery and does not think of death, that piece of information, intermingled with the news of old Bovary's death, will remain in her retentive memory.