by Jean Améry
“Gentlemen of the court! I had a claim to liberté: to struggle on behalf of my beauty, to avenge her, to choose my own escape from the world. I was owed égalité in the passion that would have made me Emma’s equal, and also her creator’s, as he was inside her. Fraternité would have taken my side, for I have shown it tirelessly at the bedsides of the ill.
“Monsieur Gustave Flaubert expelled me from the realm of liberty, equality, and fraternity and made me into a serf of what was, for him, the stupidity and ugliness of the petit bourgeoisie. I accuse him, and I demand the restoration of all rights due me, what my spirit, my era, and history had reserved for me, but which the miser, the cheat, the malign weaver of words and pretty pictures refused me. Go to his distinguished hermitage and arrest him! Gag his mouth if he begins capriciously to growl, listening in rapture to his own cadences, which are as beautiful to him as I was ugly. Blind him when he looks at the countryside, where he sees only philistines from Rouen, and will not look past their congested faces to the men and citizens they conceal to the very end. Honor his word, I am not offended when one bows down before it. But judge the murder of the country doctor, the man violated by reality, the one whose pact was broken.
“Gentlemen of the court, I suffer here in my shadow world, where la belle flits past me and I cannot find the girl Berthe, who is spinning her days away, scrawny and consumptive, at some machine. Forgive me, dear men, accomplices of the great man of Croisset, that I have gone on for too long. I am just a dummy, a ridiculus, who for a moment fancied suing his superior. You will release him, once more, on account of his heritage, and I’ll be left holding the bag. Our sort will never get justice: even that I could have known, for I have learned much since that first time she chatted softly with Léon and good Homais graced me with his dignified prattle.
“It may be it was all a mistake, the rights of man and the citizen, that Robespierre died for nothing, and my poor wits have deceived me. No, no, do not rise to issue the verdict! I rescind my accusation. I sit, the eternal shadow, forever in the arbor. Waiting for the mercy of death, holding the lock of hair in my hands. Saying nothing. It is right that I should fall to the ground.
“Here I lie: Continua viam viator. . . .” [57]
NOTES
Translator’s note: The French and Latin words and phrases have been preserved in their respective languages, just as they appeared in the original German text.
1 “Cuckolded husbands who know nothing know everything, all the same.”
2 “Fate is to blame.” This phrase, according to Flaubert the only memorable one Charles Bovary uttered in his life, appears on the final page of Madame Bovary.
3 “Halt, traveler. You tread on a beloved wife.”
4 “Leave me alone.” Emma utters the phrase several times in Madame Bovary, perhaps most cruelly when Charles asks her for a kiss after botching Hippolyte’s surgery.
5 “Reason forbid, my poor friend.”
6 Quoted from two sections of The Public vs. M. Gustave Flaubert, which records the ultimately unsuccessful attempt to prosecute Madame Bovary for obscenity in 1856.
7 “The poor man,” but with a shade of contempt. Emma utters these words twice in a row early in Madame Bovary, after Charles recounts to her an episode of professional humiliation. He believes he has won her sympathy; in fact, he inspires derision. The term occurs several times in the book, always with a peculiar combination of pity and scorn.
8 “My little boy this, my little boy that.”
9 “Tender little cat.” The word chatte may mean something like “sweetie” but is also slang for a woman’s genitalia.
10 “I am ridiculous.” When Charles Bovary causes a scene at his new school in the first pages of Madame Bovary, his teacher assigns him to write out twenty complete conjugations of “ridiculus sum.”
11 “Charles Bovary was never ridiculous.”
12 A pun on the German Brand, which can mean “fire” as well as “gangrene.”
13 “It was the fault of fate, my fault: fate was I.” There is perhaps an echo here of Flaubert’s famous (probably spurious) phrase, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.”
14 Améry is referring here to a passage in Madame Bovary in which Rodolphe calls at the Bovary residence and presents himself as Monsieur Rodolphe Boulanger de la Huchette, not, as Flaubert notes, “out of a landowner’s vanity, but to make himself more easily identifiable.”
15 “He’s courting her, that’s normal.”
16 “God forgive me.”
17 “Quidquid volueris,” the Latin equivalent of “as you like it,” is the title of one of the more curious stories Flaubert wrote in his youth. It tells of a French anthropologist in Brazil who mates a female slave with an orangutan. The woman dies in childbirth, and sixteen years later, her monstrous offspring commits a savage murder, then kills himself. The anthropologist has him stuffed and put on display in a museum. “Vous l’aurez voulu,” here means, in essence, “you asked for it.” Georges Dandin or the Confounded Husband is a comedy by Molière about a man who marries above his station.
18 Cocu: cuckold. Le Café du Commerce here is not a physical place; the French term “discussion de Café du Commerce” is a generic term for idle, often ill-informed conversation.
19 “Good sentiments make bad literature.”
20 The reference is to David Hume, and the concept in turn, known as “bundle theory,” had a profound effect on German phenomenology, which is the probable source of Améry’s acquaintance with it.
21 A reference to Theodor Lessing’s Geschichte als Sinngebung des Sinnlosen.
22 The story is told twice, with variations, in The Prisoner and Albertine Gone. An interesting discussion of the anecdote appears in Daniel Karlin’s Proust’s English.
23 “Dismal plain.” This is a reference to Victor Hugo’s poem “The Expiation.”
24 This appears in English in the original text.
25 “But yes, she is him, Gustave Flaubert.”
26 The complete phrase, “Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi” (Gods may do what cattle may not).
27 Possibly a reference to Nietzsche’s poem “Nur narr! Nur Dichter!” (Just a Fool! Just a Poet!).
28 “Forever, your Léon. I love you as a man has never loved a woman. Our room at the Hôtel de Boulogne. Our bed. The scent of your body.”
29 “I still feel your body against mine and count the hours until my dream comes true.”
30 “When I wrapped you in my coat, I swore that no other woman ever . . .”
31 The Citizen King is Louis Philippe I, proclaimed king in 1830 after the July Revolution forced his cousin Charles X to abdicate.
32 “Only whores enjoy it.”
33 “I am and remain for eternity the slave to our love.”
34 “Little kitten, tender little kitten, I love you as no man has ever loved a woman, my adored one, I am counting the hours. . . .”
35 “Léon, slave to your love, counting the hours, your body against his.”
36 “A doctor, my God! A man is dying!”
37 “And let the axe fall.”
38 “The Chief Prosecutor is me.”
39 “Enrich yourselves.”
40 Julien Sorel is the protagonist of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black. He is executed by guillotine for attempted murder.
41 Luise Miller is a central character in Friedrich Schiller’s 1784 play Intrigue and Love. Her name is also the title of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera based on Schiller’s play.
42 This is a reference to a line from Friedrich Hölderlin’s “Half of Life”: “The walls stand speechless and cold / The flags clatter in the wind.”
43 The term “glossurgy” comes from the Austrian philosopher Adolf Stöhr, who defines it as “the idle flow of speech” that replaces critical thought when thinking becomes automatic.
44 The quote in its entirety is: “To write well is to think well, to feel well, and to render well; it is to possess at once intellect, soul, and taste.” Améry ha
s substituted “bien dire” for “bien rendre.”
45 Améry is describing the Canut revolts among the silkweavers in Lyon (in 1831, 1834, and 1848), which Friedrich Engels considered the first worker uprisings of the Industrial Revolution.
46 “Charles Bovary, medical officer from Yonville-l’Abbaye, versus Rodolphe Boulanger, owner of La Huchette.”
47 Tricoteuse, literally “spinster,” is a nickname for the market women who attended executions by guillotine.
48 “All condemned to death will be beheaded.”
49 “Come close to me, my tender kitten, open your legs.”
50 “With a pale face, clutching the phial of poison in his left hand.”
51 “Contradictiones in adiecto” is a specific type of contradiction in terms in which the adjective is opposed to the noun it modifies: a brief infinity, a sweet bitterness.
52 From the last page of Madame Bovary, this is the scene of Charles’s death. “At seven o’clock, little Berthe, who hadn’t seen him all afternoon, came to fetch him for dinner. His head was leaning against the wall, his eyes closed, his mouth open, and his hands held a long lock of black hair.”
53 The reference is Goethe’s Faust.
54 “Still, she lived, the beauty, and she lived grandly, just as she died in forlorn grandeur.”
55 “Because the die is cast, it is indeed, but I rebel all the same, against all reason, because now, it’s about me.”
56 “the lover’s lover”
57 “Go on your way, traveler. . . .”