Gustave Flaubert E-Book

Giuseppe Cafiero

• Herausgeber: Clink Street Publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 522

Beschreibung

What would happen if a character, even if only roughly sketched in the mind of a writer, decided to take on a life independent of his creator in order to take revenge against all the other characters that this author had created in his other books? This is what happens to the legendary writer Gustave Flaubert, when his character Harel-Bey comes to life with a grudge to bear. Even the imaginary characters of books that Monsieur Flaubert has never actually written, but had long pondered and discussed with his most intimate friends, begin to stir with their own motivations. Quite unexpectedly, Harel-Bey begins a long and difficult journey through the writings of Monsieur Flaubert to try to understand the reasons that induced the writer to write so many books and stories, but never the one that would have had him as leading protagonist. As a vengeful killer, Harel-Bey is determined to murder all of the protagonists of the books and stories Flaubert has written. In the company of a certain Monsieur Bouvard, himself the star of another book which Flaubert had started but never finished, Harel-Bey seeks his revenge. There's will be a mission rich in disturbing discoveries, revealing the reasons and the irrationalities of fictionalised reality and unreal fiction.

Leseprobe

Gustave Flaubert The Ambiguity of Imagination

Giuseppe Cafiero Translated by Peter Christie

Everything one invents is true, Gustave Flaubert.

Round about the corpse of Monsieur Gustave Flaubert there are machinations and human documents from which one could create a fine novel, Frères de Goncourt.

The jackals of posthumous literature continue their sad work of gathering the remains of dead lions in order to live on them, Barbey d’Aurevilly.

The life and the death of Flaubert were ambiguous in merits and intentions, Anonymous

Every history that wishes to interrelate the death and life of Monsieur Flaubert gets entangled in improbable fictions, G. C. Manliar.

After Madame Bovary Flaubert should have written livelier works, and Salammbô is unreadable: it is the worst sort of Classicism, Charles-Augustin de Sainte-Beuve.

Solitude and work will make Flaubert go out of his mind, Suzanne Langier.

Flaubert had the economic security which allowed him to free himself from many things, while I am constrained, in order to live, to write also unworthy things, Emile Zola.

It is horrible that a man like Gustave Flaubert could frequent a courtesan like Marie-Anne Detourbay, known as Jeanne de Tourbey, Princess Mathilde Bonaparte.

Flaubert is cynical with men and sentimental with women, Alphonse Daudet.

If one takes away from Gustave Flaubert the ox, the laborious and plodding animal within him, the constructor of books with the rhythm of a word per hour, one is faced with a very ordinary man of little originality, Edmond de Goncourt.

To Paola, Melissa and Emiliano.

Contents

 Title PageDedicationCharacters Aboard a ghizeh November 1869 The Letter Paris, 19 April 1885 The Investigation A Letter Copyright

Characters:

Monsieur Gustave Flaubert: Writer from Rouen, author of novels, stories and theatrical texts of little success. Apoplectic, neurotic, shameless consumer of food, drink and cheap sex. He spent a large part of his life hidden away in his country house at Croisset on the Seine, where he wore a red dressing-gown and a skull-cap on his head, surrounded by billowing curtains of Indian cotton, with large flowers, which ornamented the windows of his study. He wrote, among other things, a novel, called Madame Bovary, which made the Imperial Advocate, Monsieur Ernest Pinard, Public Minister, famous for daring to set in motion legal proceedings for obscenity, due to presumed unworthy pages contained in this work.

Madame Louise Colet: Poet of little literary merit but of profound amorous impulses, given that she was sentimentally linked with Victor Cousin, Alfred de Musset, Alphonse Karr, Christien Polonais, Franc Polonais, Franz Noller, Deputy Bancel, Octave Lacroix, Auguste Vetter, and Flaubert himself. A muse capable of burning houses and churches just to get herself talked about, she had with Monsieur Gustave Flaubert an intense relationship, stormy and given to reciprocal distrust, which took place principally in the rooms of the Hôtel du Grand-Cerf in Mantes.

Madame Caroline (Lilline) Commanville, née Hamard: Lazy, presumptuous and capricious niece of Monsieur Gustave Flaubert. She lived comfortably, first allowing her uncle to sacrifice money and fame to help her with her economic difficulties caused by the profligate investments of her husband, so that, at the death of her uncle, taking full advantage of it and with irresponsible carelessness, she was responsible for incorrect and harmful republications of her uncle’s works, the rights of which had devolved upon her.

Baron Maxime Du Camp: Writer, memorialist and thoroughgoing narcissist, he spent most of his life in the attempt to be accepted as the trustworthy confidant of Monsieur Flaubert; in truth, he was an unfailing detractor and loved to gossip about Flaubert with loaded insinuations and incurable ill-will.

Monsieur François Denys Bartholomée Bouvard: formerly copy-clerk with the firm of Descambos Bros., & Monsieur Juste Romain Cyrille Pécuchet: formerly copy-clerk with the Ministry of the Navy. Protagonists of adventurous tales and impracticable manners of life in a village of Calvados named Chavignolles. They were also passionate advocates of research and investigations on human knowledge, so that they engaged – in the chapters of a novel which never arrived at the word ‘End’ – in a thousand trades, arts and adventures, all catastrophically impracticable but which offered them the opportunity to acquire the faculty of collecting, annotating and transcribing the stolid stupidity of humanity.

Harel Bey: An Arab who spent his existence in the drawing-room of the brothers Jules and Edmond de Goncourt, authors of a celebrated Journal, where he was born, amidst various revelries on the evening of 29 March 1862, from the fervid imagination of Monsieur Gustave Flaubert. It is precisely in this Journal where it is possible to find, even today, traces of his eventual life.

Khédive of Cairo: An official whose task was to deal with the unusual and inane questions of travellers and tourists visiting Egypt. He had a decisive role in confounding, with meaningless words and false actions, the wordy pretensions of Madame Louise Colet, intent on knowing, in the most minute particulars, the events and hardships of Monsieur Flaubert’s journey in Egypt.

And also:

Félicité: The domestic servant of Madame Aubain; she was a very pious woman, silent and lovingly linked to the family who gave her hospitality. She spent her entire life living in the garret of her employer’s house, having as her sole companion and source of affection a parrot called Loulou.

The unknown traveller on the train from Deauville to Paris: An uxoricide? Certainly a man who had spent his time, hours, days and weeks, amidst tribunals and hippodromes, transcribing acts and noting on cards the names and numbers of disdainful, capricious, losing horses.

Father Tabarant: Prelate of the church of Saint-Sauveur au Petit-Andely, who believed himself to have correct information about what had happened to Gustave Flaubert on a night in January 1844 at Pont-l’Évêque.

Madame la Chanteuse: Singer who spent her life reciting and singing the legend of Saint Julian in the Restaurant Bonvalet in boulevard du Temple in Paris, waiting for a writer to grant her a role in some novel.

Mademoiselle Julie, called la Tata: Domestic servant in the Flaubert family, who spent her entire life with them. And to Gustave she loved to say: It is we who revive the memories of past times.

Monsieur Leon Grappin: A small, unpleasant and obsequious man; nevertheless a bookseller at Sens where he owned a well-stocked bookshop. He was also a passionate collector of licentious books.

The man from Mantes: An individual who loved to rub his hands with assiduity and zeal, and with assiduity and zeal smiled with subtle malice. He was small, thinning at the temples, dressed in black clothes shiny with wear and parsimony.

The gendarme of Yonville-l’Abbaye: A tall, thin figure with a black moustache and sideburns – à la Dumas fils which seemed artificial – of a bronze complexion and a familiar look.

Monsieur Lèger: Gravedigger of Croisset with a passion for daguerreotypes. He made, perhaps for Gustave, a number of photographs: perhaps indecent ones, perhaps useful to compare physiognomies of places and persons.

Aboard a ghizeh November 1869

Cher ami, cher Maxime1: my confidante and most courteous knight.

For twenty years that devotee of love has battered and soiled with his coarse hands the pedestal of seduction, concealed in an unknown temple, beautiful and rare as a temple of Ancient Greece, uncontaminated and hidden for centuries. What can one expect from a man afflicted with a tyrannical and possessive mother, with her emotional blackmail, and with an obscure nervous malady which made him megalomaniac and presumptuous?

I remember well the letter in which, with impertinence and arrogance, he blamed me because I was jealous of the heedless love that he nourished for his mother. An incontestable truth: I was immoderately resentful in the face of that impudent genetrix. And he? He delivered sarcastic judgments. He was annoyed and bored by my wearisome loving solicitude. He also made pronouncements with scorn and arrogance. He warned me that it was really not his business to prevent me from nourishing resentment and rancour towards the person who had brought him into the world. He held forth in this way with arrogance and meanness. And he also observed that it was his mother, Madame Anne Bustine Caroline Flaubert, née Fleuriot, who was more important to him than anything else in the world. Yes, indeed, his mother, who sighed with amorous pleasure when she saw him return home, who sighed with amorous suffering when she saw him leave, who sighed with amorous yearnings every time she heard him speak. A river of sighs, indeed. His mother, preoccupied as she was with obsessive funereal hallucinations, obligated him, with concealed malice and amidst fantasies of ill-health and artificial fainting-fits, to pass unwholesome and tedious moments close to her, to hold her hands, to kiss her forehead. Madame Flaubert thus acted out a drama of ceremonious lamentations and reproofs, using only her own silent and lethal presence, which was like an indiscreet convulsion, a purulent and occult burn.

Thus Gustave was pedantically indifferent and presumptuously haughty in relation to my own feelings, so agitated by an immoderate and uncontrollable love in regard to him. He soon forgot what he wrote to me with a lover’s intensity – that, worn out and disconsolate because of the distance between us, he thought continuously of my face, of my shoulders, of my white neck, of my smile, of my passionate voice, violent and at the same time as sweet as a cry of love2. He was slothful and distrustful, since he took to wounding me, almost to injuring me with his ferocious sarcasm, putting forward pretexts, as it seemed to him in fact of little value to have to throw himself at my feet to talk himself hoarse declaring his love like a boorish child with false and deceptive words. “They say that love is heaven,” he wrote to me in December 1847, and added jokingly – “But the heavens are often cloudy without taking into account the fury of storms3.” It’s true that I had become fatter, that I no longer had an enviable figure, though even then I was still very elegant and well-formed. I had breasts, shoulders and arms of great beauty. My neck harmonised perfectly with my face … My legs were perfect, slender at the ankles, and ended in very beautiful feet, which were extremely slender in contrast to my figure4.

What more could a man desire?

Instead Gustave became increasingly impulsive, disloyal, full of animosity. He shamefully lamented when my menstrual period didn’t arrive on time, almost as if he was afraid of compromising himself with a possible pregnancy of mine, since paternity was for him an obscene thing, horribly obscene, a thing which resolved itself always in a squalid, disgraceful experience. He reproved me bitterly for my exuberant requests for affection, for my longing desires for a requited love, for my impassioned reproaches in regard to him, because I had persuaded myself that he compensated his own sexual exuberance with orgiastic and masturbatory intellectual games. Because, in fact, he wrote to me in March 1847: “Your ideas of morality, of homeland, of devotion, your tastes in literature: all these were antithetical to my ideas, to my tastes, to my emotionality, as I am aroused only by pure line, clear contour, beautiful colour. In contrast, I encountered in you always and only a confused tone, a sentimentality capable of attenuating everything, of rendering it sentimental in a mediocre way, also and above all your spirit”.

And you, Max, to console such conjectures of mine, revealed to me many times that Gustave, between the age of twenty and twenty-four years, had made a show of his own sexual abstinence, because, he asserted – honouring incoherent aphorisms and very personal statements – that a man models himself on certain vanities, on a particular pride deprived of instinct, on secret theories that facilitate the ostentation of one’s complacent diversity. Do you remember Max, do you remember these disquieting revelations of yours?

Gustave then drew forth, in disparate and unwholesome circumstances, ironic blows and biting words, attesting to me that the supposed acts of wildness ascribed to him were in fact performed only at his writing-table. He was forced to wear himself out, between writing and note-taking, for long hours and to dissipate, with scrupulous pedantry and endemic neurasthenia, reams of paper simply to spell out and order with obsessive precision sentence after sentence, word after word, syllable after syllable for the sole and unique pleasure of appeasing his own senses and morbidly satisfying his own sensuality, with the singular concern of drawing up a page which might have appropriate concepts and pleasing and appropriate writing.

What can you expect from a man overwhelmed by an instinctive and immoderate frenzy in the need to frequent brothels, above all on the night of St. Sylvester so as to inaugurate in this way, in commercial love-affairs, the year that was to follow, or to swiftly and brusquely submit to a lascivious, dissolute and shameless love for an Oriental prostitute? Remember, Max, do you remember? I have in mind stories that you had the effrontery to tell me, haphazardly filling pages of frivolous correspondence when you returned from the Orient with our man, or that you had the smugness to set out in detail for me when, finding ourselves by chance in some boudoir speaking about him, you had the boldness to profane my chaste pride in telling tales about the ardent and impudent conquest of women of easy habits when you accompanied him, loitering about in distant lands, roving fecklessly and impudently through Egypt.

Monsieur Flaubert, Gustave I mean, wounded me with those infamous acts of concupiscence. He besmirched our love not only with the libertinage of his body but still more, and what is worse, with the libertinage of his soul and with the lowness and squalor of his vanity. He outraged my pride, my honesty and my honour without remorse. I was and am an upright woman, respectful towards those close to me and obsequious in love for one near to me. Never haughty, frivolous or defamatory towards noble hearts and spirits, I have indeed courted, with admirable and noble modesty, the intellect of others. I had to learn and consecrate myself to the cleverness of lofty intelligences at the time in which I took to frequenting the Bonne Compagnie, journal de fashions, toilettes, ameublement, théâtre, livres nouveaux, romans poésies, causeries, which was located at 20 rue Bergere in Paris, a few steps away from the Conservatory of Music, and frequented by Victor Hugo, by Charles-Marie Leconte de Lisle, by Théophile Gautier, by Pierre-Jean Béranger, by Alfred de Vigny and by other subtle and extremely acute minds.

Gustave, instead, preferred Egypt, abruptly and without warning, in order to travel to turbid places, to Esneh, the city of almées and ghawazis, of dancers and prostitutes. As a result, indeed with melancholy, I was obliged to make a voyage to Esneh to assure myself of replies, to recompense a wounded pride, to escape exacerbated anxieties, to rummage in the introverted negligence of a man named Gustave. Gustave had in the meantime begun to blurt out on all sides that it was inevitable that we separate, that he was the absolute master of his sentiments, that at present neither I nor any other woman had the soul or body to conquer him and to bind him to us, that in Egypt he had had the opportunity to encounter an almée – Koutchouk-Hanem – and that it had been extraordinary, singular and unforgettable to spend a night with her, with Koutchouk-Hanem, the almée.

Perhaps Esneh and Koutchouk-Hanem conserved desired answers, or at least justifications, or even plausible reasons for a promise rent twenty years ago when the sky of Egypt loosened, in the dead calm, the triangular sails of ships, the litanies of sailors who accompanied the changing of routes, the herons and the storks that rose up in flight from the banks of the river crowded with their flocks, the nights that were languidly warm and welcoming like the soft bellies of the Egyptian women, and the sycamores whose shadows protected villages stifled by heat. And the women who danced with the lightness of sinuous bodies, their fascinating gazes lost in dissolute thoughts, amidst inadmissible desires of carnal loves.

Egypt, hieratic and monumental, deprived of shade, yet rich in taut and splendid light and enveloped in colours which became changeable and dazzling in a luminous dimension, which in truth we neglect. Then, indeed just then, the softened keels of the cangias – concave, flexible, carved by expert hands according to long-lost rules – opened to the winds, with the splashing of waves, the boisterous uproar of the river birds, the barking of dogs arriving from distant embankments and sandbanks, the shouts of the dragomen when the paths of two boats crossed and they began to exchange greetings and conversation from a distance.

The heat deepened the wrinkles on faces burnt by the sun, increased a sort of contemplative laziness, sharpened the rancid stench of the sweat of armpits, revealed the shameless dancing of the transvestites who delighted in moving sinuously while wearing commodious breeches and short blouses embroidered so that one could glimpse the navel, the uncovered, shaved and indecent genitalia of the courtesans. It showed caravanserai skilfully quartered, camels lazily traversing the bazaar, tinkling bells of men who spent their time sucking the aromatic tobacco from hookahs, and fields of sugar cane, and the ritual whirling dances of the dervishes amidst fierce banging on the tambourine, and the market of slaves – one could acquire one for a few para – and syphilis, and cholera, and death enthroned amidst the carcasses of camels, asses, horses.

The cities, from Benisouf to Minieh, from Beni Hassan to Assyout, from Thebes to Dendara, from Karnak to Esneh, were drowsing in a languid lassitude, under the alert watch of the new lords, while the great river flowed placidly, winding amidst lands buried in sand, though they had been conquered in stretches along the banks by waves of vegetation: palms or reeds consumed by the wind. The seasons changed in the convulsion of events, and the friezes of colour took on mysterious foreign accents. The waters of the river symbolized marriages between the city of the living and the city of the dead in the slow change from light to darkness, from darkness to light. Then suddenly, in a horizon lit by the first light of day, the colours baptized the surroundings. Thus came a thousand sensations and alternations of the mind. The dazzling light brought to view things never seen or imagined: pink-tinged mountains, turtle-doves nesting in the branches, storks and cranes, and boats which, silently furrowing the waters, carried slaves to the market.

Each town had been baptized as a daughter of the great river. Some, enclosed within white walls and erected like a fortress rooted in a river delta open to the sea, exhibited bazaars laden with pottery glazed in red and black, embossed silver, percussion instruments, coops crammed with chickens, weapons chiselled by skilled hands, chibuk from inlaid fireplaces, habar with beautiful embroidery, tarbuk adorned in red. Then, in the abandonment of memories that had never wholly vanished, there were sanctuaries, obelisks, necropolises, tombs of caliphs, minarets as vestiges swallowed up in cities, there beyond every periphery, where the women wore blue costumes adorned with the glittering gold of bracelets, necklaces, amulets.

El-Bahar, the Nile, had allowed itself to be conquered in all its immensity without opposing excessive resistance to the Ottomans. It had given itself up to a stronger foreign people and had consumed its maternal lap in the sacrifice of subjection – and without any desire for deliverance now that the Mameluk sovereigns had begun to exercise the local powers. The feverish fires of the river banks were the only memories kept by the men of the river, the great river, and they gathered together in prayer, in the calm of a silence imposed by memory.

Today, deafening sounds run together in an agitation of names pronounced frenetically, barely distinguishable names in dissonant, unknown, obscure tongues. The Nile in any case had conceded itself to the infinite melancholy of antique and vanishing remnants, to shoddy gestures and signs, to ambiguous sacrifices in the midst of populous banks, among low houses in grey stone, oppressed by pale minarets in white limestone there at the crossings of salt water and fresh water canals, in quarries smothered by the heat where sand is dug up for seventy cents per cubic metre due to the shrewdness of Monsieur Ferdinand Marie de Lesseps5 who has at his disposition, dependency and orders millions of francs, thirty thousand men, thousands and thousands of animals and a part of the Compagnie Universal de Canal Maritime de Suez, capital 200,000,000 francs, for a period of ninety-nine years. Each Share of five hundred francs to the Bearer gives the right: 1st, to the ownership of 1/400,000 of the company assets; 2nd, to an interest of 5% on the sum spent, payable by the semester on 1 January and 1 July of each year; 3rd, to an annual dividend payable on the 1 July.

Monsieur Ferdinand Marie de Lesseps, having reached the right bank of the great river – it was in 1859 – allowed the harmonious waters to flow behind him and began to scrutinize the narrow strip of sand which stretched from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea for about 100 kilometres, cut here and there by the lakes Amari, Timsah, Ballah and Mensaleh and meeting in an angle the spur of the El-Guisr rocks.

A succinct narration, in which I believed with enchantment and ingenuity, my dear Max. And then to mention events, to reveal that there were about twenty thousand fallah or Egyptian peasants conscripted to the work. Is it possible, Max? Only shovels and picks to fill up wicker baskets with sand and rocks, so that camels and asses could drag them away to deliver the rubble to distant places.

Finally, to bring to an end such an imposing labour of hydraulic engineering, the rash Suez Canal to be clear, there were dredging machines and elevators operated by diligent European labourers. Superior orders, it was whispered and they whisper to me in telling of the events. Is it the truth, Max? Is it possible that the Sublime Port – Bab o Qapi, Arabic or Turkish as the language of Istanbul might be – forbade Monsieur Ferdinand-Marie de Lesseps from using the fallah for the difficult labour of excavation? Does that seem credible to you, Max? Does it seem reasonable to subject to hard labour, in the blinding heat of the desert, men of our race solely for arrogant and senseless revenge or for the unmotivated senselessness of miserable Oriental customs?

Meanwhile Isma’il Pasha, Khédive of Egypt, benefited from this majestic work, committed as he was, and by his own will and determination, to the rite of a Masonic Lodge offered to him by Monsieur Ferdinand Marie de Lesseps. Thus Isma’il Pasha became, and quickly, an astute charlatan and clever huckster, but also a reckless profiteer since he began to speculate on cane sugar to compete with the Confederate States of America which were in the midst of losing their slaves in a deadly civil war. Max, you met Isma’il Pasha did you not? You met him when you frequented those places in the company of that character Gustave Flaubert?

With noteworthy attention, Isma’il Pasha, Monsieur Ferdinand Marie de Lesseps and the entrepreneurs of the Suez Canal Company requested my presence in the land of Egypt to celebrate the Grand Opening of the Suez Canal on 17 November. There were sixty ships of various tonnages to witness the event. And royal yachts. And flags and pennants. And roaring cannons. And unfurled sails. And the puffing of smokestacks. And tents spread out on the river banks. And fields of sugarcane to frame it all. And cotton plantations. And teams of buffalos. And saddled donkeys. And camels in processions. And shouting dervishes. And costumed dances of the almées. And eyes painted with kohl. And the strident sounds of the tarabuk. And litanies of rebecs. And rhythms of cymbals. And horses at the gallop. And court carriages. And the Khédive’s conak. Janissaries, Mamelukes, uniformed cawas, sheiks in zimarras. The crowned heads of half of Europe. Majestic candelabras, faint lights, liveried servants, Sheffield silver, Limoges porcelain, Baccarat crystal, Bruges tapestries. A sumptuous menu, with a Grand Souper set up for that exceptional event, around the succulent and fabulous dish Poisson a la Réunion des Deux Mers, created especially for the occasion.

All splendid, Max, believe me: splendid!

Royal ships then carried us guests along the ancient paths of Upper Egypt, allowing us to steal a slice of pure sky, uncontaminated because of that wind which, from North to South, in November, sweeps the sky and lightly ripples the waters which, in their earth-tinted colours, are fragrant of fertile magnanimity. Herons and storks immobile on the banks seemed to become inebriated by the sinuous waves of the waters. The palms seemed black as ink in a fire-red sky while the women on the banks were wrapped in intense blue fabrics.

Then a song, slow, melancholy, persuasive. The song of an almée to the rhythm of a small drum while a milayah covered part of her face: “I sing for you drunk with your beauty / with my hands on the harp I celebrate / the beauty of your face / I sing for you drunk with your beauty / for you all beings are dancing / Imploring they gather in front of you / I sing for you, drunk with your beauty / the young shoots turn to you / and become as beautiful as lilies”.

Aboard a ghizeh, marked by the memory of new and old seductions, I slowly lost the lament of this song and suddenly saw a town, ships of the Compagnie Azizié, dark waters, nocturnal, glittering with the reflections of the lights of the port. I saw Bulak disappear on the horizon: a vivid periphery piled up on the right bank of the river, suffocated by factories, workshops, warehouses and a port teeming with lowered sails, men burdened with the weight of the loads they bore, excited voices, various jargons, Arabs amidst the reckless rituals of the courbach and the magnanimity of the batchis. Now distant from the Citadel, the pyramids of Abusir and Dahshur, while a shrill voice recalled the moving words pronounced by Monsieur Ferdinand Marie de Lesseps at the inauguration of the Canal, of  or Qanat al-Suways on 16 November 1860: “Oh God, let your divine breath descend upon these waters! That you pass and repass from Occident to Orient, from Orient to Occident! Oh God! Make use of this pathway to draw men closer to each other!”

Glancing now at the waters of the river, I read signs of the passage of very tender nostalgias, of vanished sweetness. The treacherous waters cradle desires in a soothing and persuasive rise and fall, defacing truth amidst hollow sounds of sides of boats struck by waves, by winds, by a light composed of milky, languid, reflected glimmerings. The horizon stands out vividly among purple reflections as the sun plays hide and seek with the striking profiles of the pyramids. Lethargy subjugates the comfortable harmonies of the mind.

Thus melancholy mingles with recollections, recollections with melancholy. Reality becomes an indecipherable, ambiguous game, subject to perceptions lost and acquired, acquired and lost in an indolent, neglected, slothful cadence. Recollections finally scarred truths, yielded to desires, to untoward psychological wounds, ambiguously deceived by lucid thoughts. Shadows, the shadows of the mind have taken meaning in objects, in faces, in places signalling dangers and expectations – perhaps desired and sought.

For a moment, I recognized next to me Gustave’s face, his penetrating eyes, his massive, dark, offensive body. Almost “a wild bison of the deserts of America / Vigorous and proud in his athletic force / Jumped on my breast, spread out his black hair, / And without ever tiringme instilled life into me6”. It seemed that I was once again in Mantes, in the Hôtel du Grand-Cerf, when I made him dizzy with my love, when it was the moment for sighs and desires, when something mysterious and sweet united us, and thus he wrote to me in a time long past “I am enfeebled, befuddled as after a long orgy. I am bored. I have an unprecedented emptiness in my heart … Your love has made me sad … I should like never to have known you … and yet at the same time when I think of you I feel myself inundated with a great sweetness7”.

I also recognized Gustave’s mouth. A mouth marked by a sarcastic smile, a mouth intent on kissing another mouth, a horrible mouth marked by heavy make-up: the mouth of a courtesan, of an almée, of Koutchouk-Hanem certainly, who knew how to sing songs without meaning and incomprehensible8 for Gustave, but also knew how to offer her splendid body, perfumed with sweet terebinth, to the inauspicious desire of Gustave, who consummated this mercenary love on a filthy bed of palm-canes.

I imagined then alliances among women to decipher the secrets of a man, his ordinary love, his sexual manias, the erotic frenzies which had overcome and offended my purity, my virginal ingenuity, my passive submission when, in the Orient, and in your company, my dear Max, you devoted yourselves to the most bestial sort of sodomy, frequenting baths and young nude masseurs.

My native land, Provence, dazzling with light, left me heir to the pride of humility, the power of being attentive, wise, allured only by simplicity of form and mind. Provence, a land that has never generated unworthy men, capable even of assassinating the youth of fragile women.

Thus I was overwhelmed by punitive ambiguity, by bitter reproofs, by emotional dismissals, by friendships corrupted by the egoism of others. It was so with Gustave, but also with Victor Cousin, with Alfred de Musset, with Alphonse Karr, with Champfleury or rather Jules François Felix Fleury-Husson. It was so with my husband Hippolyte Colet, and with many others who entrapped me with various deceptions and with deception abandoned me without reason or cause.

My life, to look at it closely, seems fragmented, as in a kaleidoscope. Yet my childhood and my youth, spent in the Val d’Arc – overlooked and protected by Sainte-Victoire, the mountain that culminates in the Pic des Mouches and was cursed by the Teutons and the Ambrones, joined by a Castellum, by the Aquae Sextiae, the thermal springs – my childhood and my youth were nobly enhanced, by virtue and wisdom, by my city, by Aix, liberated by a Court of Auditors, by a Court of Donatives.

From Aix I inherited ancient wisdom, ancient prudence, ancient shrewdness, which accompanied me on the road of life, without permitting a single departure from the healthy morality of an ethos, from each divine messenger who, like a magical Ariel, might appear in the guise of a mortal being.

Verse became a signal. And I, Louise, piscôum doumeiselle poulida comme une fade9, I, at eighteen years of age, beautiful and desired and marked by the concupiscent looks of men, took to the difficult labour of composing four beautiful verses on love, profane love, though tender and devoted. I learned Latin with a firm and decisive obstinacy to be able to read the great poets of antiquity in their own tongue, to draw near to them, to share with them the joy and pain of composing verses.

I never engaged in sentimental outrages towards anyone, still less towards a boy, a youth. The vicissitude of the suicide of a lover – an event that occurred when I was a young girl and the boy was afflicted with a notable ugliness – was a lying piece of gossip and an ignoble slander. If there was indeed a violent death, it was caused by the unhappiness of a soul because beauty alone is beautiful, love alone is great10. In Aix, a small city, it was permissible and necessary to frequent only faithful, devoted and honest friends. It was often my custom, in order to forget the melancholy of vulgar chatter, to converse with myself, reciting blank verse or hendecasyllables, so as to wander freely on Parnassus, thus eluding bothersome visits.

Née Révoil, from an ancient parliamentary family, from a father, Antoine, director of the post office, associated with an earldom on the side of my mother, Henriette Le Blanc, I was free to engage in study or in joyous acts of cultural ardour. I read and acquired learning while others devoted themselves to the turbulences of youth.

I gave charitable help to the needy, unfortunate and rejected, offering them pieces of stale bread stolen from my noble table. I lived at that time in the castle of Servannes, at Mouriès, with aunts of noble lineage, severe, of aristocratic principles. I took part in the fable of the most touching generosity, I offended the uglinesses of the world, discovering myself to be an enchantress raised for poetry.

I was beautiful, charming and envied. The great linden trees of the avenues accompanied my passing and the organza of my dress fluttered in the midst of the worn, ordinary, banal clothing of the peasants. Like a celestial apparition, et vera incessu patuit dea11, people admired me and I, thanks to Aix, home of the Mistral, embellished myself with a sentimental education that precluded my becoming a fantaisiste cruel12, a haughty person.

It was then that Hippolyte Colet irrupted into my life, bewitching me with his music while his loose-knit, suffering figure, oppressed by fatigue, gave itself up to the execution of sonatas, arias, variations. Then came Paris, when Hippolyte was appointed professor of composition at the Conservatoire. It was 1835.

The shadows of Parisian evenings were reassuring even in the leaden colours of autumn, in the first chills, in the rains, in the mud of the streets and in the bewilderment at the opaque splendour of bridges and a river hosting barges. I felt nostalgia for the intense colours of Provence, for the odours of the orange trees and myrtle and, desiring bay and not myrtle, I soothed myself with a dream long-nourished, delicate and scandalous.

Juliette was the long-sought light. Madame Juliette Recamier was a wise friend. She opened the doors of her literary salon to me, and the Abbaye-aux-Bois, at 16 rue de Sevres, became my habitual retreat to recite verses, to listen to poetry. Chateaubriand was more than a father to me, he was the consoling angel. The God of an ideal world, the living lyre, the divine messenger, the immaterial being13, surrounded by a myriad of cherubim, of guardians of the sacredness of art, of immortality, of life. And so too were Alfred de Vigny, Leconte de Lisle, James Prandier. Later came the consoling friendships of Victor Hugo, Alfred de Musset, Barbey d’Aurevilley, Pierre-Jean de Berange, Armand de Portmartin.

The salon of Madame Recamier and the Abbaye-Aux-Bois also echoed with opportune notes, with cadenced musical schemes, with symphonic articulations representing prodigious designs of musical writing and magical interpretations.

But no particular mastery accompanied Hippolyte, neither his own inventions nor his loving, infectious anthologies. Hippolyte had only a mediocre musicality to offer. He didn’t aspire to better himself, to embrace a new kind of polychromy when he performed for money; he didn’t try to dress himself up with a charm more seductive than mere banality, as was appropriate to him.

But I had already fallen into the trap laid by Hippolyte. Perhaps I had been conquered by the romantic fascination which an uncommon artist inspires, one little inclined to the usual social life because he was a humble professor at the conservatory, because he was a composer of little value. Hippolyte was inclined to elude the painful fatigue of applying himself, of the hard labour of creativity, of strong-willed instrumental investigations. His Panharmonie musicale had only a modest reception – and it couldn’t have been otherwise.

Hippolyte consumed himself, meanwhile, in vigorous and shameful drinking bouts, in the satisfaction of ordinary, mediocre, plebeian tastes, while I accorded myself the companionship of an accomplished guide, of a wise Virgil. Victor Cousin was a dear friend to me in my suffering as a wife, in the bitter labour of writing poetry, in the arrogance and jealousy of uncivil intellectuals, in the lack of affection from my husband.

I worked with application, with method, with intelligent ability. I inspired the compassionate interest of critics, admirers, readers. I became the Muse of the new France, without however betraying my duties as a woman, as a student of life, of position and a valued frequenter of salons.

I overcame ill-natured gossip and devious people who intrigued amidst the mutterings of grumblers. I wrote, I published, I gathered praise while, with an outstanding mastery of behaviour and courage, there grew ever stronger in me the determination to reach objectives that continually became more coveted, more fulfilling, more secure. His Royal Majesty the Duke of Orleans wanted to honour my person, and for the highest poetic merit awarded me a platinum medal – with a commercial value of well over a thousand scudi. Victor Cousin, in that circumstance, did not exert any influence of any kind or any authority or prestige – nor could he given his rank and prestige. Evil tongues were, promptly and with reason, proved wrong, even though they continued to insinuate that my adored daughter Henriette was his also.

Victor was, I confirm this vigorously, a dear, affectionate and good friend. He corrected errors of application, of writing, of human and social approaches. He helped me to attend salons. He spurred me to moderate my obligingness, to conceal my good nature which led me to overvalue friendship. He urged me to trust in my innate provincial intuition – which led me to be unyielding towards adulation, vanity, baseness.

I was not in fact la piqûre de Cousin14, as Alphonse Karr went around saying. Karr with whom I had, in fact, salutary relations. Then proud of my liberty of judgment, I was the Charlotte Corday of literature, and my La Jeunesse de Mirabeau was a brilliant example of intellectual coherence, while the perfidious and calumnious accusations of plagiarism could take on body and spirit only in petty, shabby, conniving minds, not at all those gifted with good taste. Never have I been the maid-of-all-work of French poetry, but rather the manipulator of verses cadenced with Latin rhymes, with a unique instinct, with the teachings of skilled and correct masters.

To follow a path, without searching for shortcuts!

I always strenuously defended my dignity and never, I repeat never, gave way to arrogant flattery, nor to obscenely wretched proposals. I was the sister of the muses, sister of the graces, and not the industrious bee that comes and goes, always plundering and looting. Monsieur Cave, director of the Beaux-Arts, knows this very well. Unfair, Monsieur Cave! He will certainly remember my name. Unfair, Monsieur Cave!

The circumstance by which a pension was granted me was a dishonest farce, artfully contrived by one who wanted to discredit me, to treat a defenceless woman with ferocity, to injure a sincere and valued friend of a philosopher like Victor Cousin. He gossiped with much worthless rubbish, and the malevolent aphorisms and the slanderous judgments of Monsieur Paul Ginisty, a third-rate journalist and writer, were wisely ignored. Unfair, Monsieur Ginisty!

The truth did not hold correct judgments and accounts outstanding! It was my nobility of soul which made me reject the first offer of an annuity from Monsieur Cave – beyond the meagreness of the proposed amount, which could well have provoked irritation and poisonous fits of anger. I did not give way to treacherous proposals. And I had good reason not to do so.

The dignity of the poet must always be safeguarded ante omnes. And Monsieur Cave’s offer humiliated my artistic respectability, because it was unnatural, apart from uncommon in suggesting a need to redeem with such a miserable annuity the illicit privations and immoral suffering involved in dedicating oneself body and soul to art.

Monsieur Cave repented, however, and in time. Indeed, Victor explained to him, with the intellectual tenacity that distinguishes him and with the reasoning of a subtle philosophical and ethical nature, the reasons behind my instinctive refusal. Monsieur Cave made amendments and invited me, with frank and convincing words and with a vigorous supply of concrete examples, not to wrong the Institut des Beaux-Arts, which would be proud to number me among its protégées. Well done, Monsieur Cave! Really, well done!

Thus dignity was restored to my intellectual honourability since, with a conspicuous increase of income, certain wounds that had been inflicted were healed, certainties were offered to my future as a poetess and the vileness of earning money in order to live could be avoided.

Now I esteem, and more than ever, the Institut des Beaux-Arts. Monsieur Cave esteems, and more than ever, my work as a writer and my reputation.

Hippolyte, meanwhile, busied himself with his existence amongst infantile caprices, lulled himself with indolence, in the equivocal game of being a maudit15, in the subterfuge of coarse and cowardly lies, he busied himself between fée verte with its seductive emerald colour and the rustling skirts of prostitutes. Hippolyte took to frequenting the salons, but his carelessness of dress, his negligence of bearing, his neglect of washing himself rendered him unpopular, undesirable, sometimes detested. It would have been sufficient to look after his person more attentively and not to execrate water, in a peremptory manner, as a cruel ablution.

Hippolyte was also corrupted by an absurd professional jealousy in relation to me. As a narrow-minded, petty man, idle, little inclined to recognize the worth of others, he wished to impose restrictions on my status as a successful writer, a woman loved for her sagacity, for her verve, for her amiability in surrounding herself with personalities and personages who were both likeable and famous.

Hippolyte finally descended into absurdity, engaging in vile intrigues and deplorable behaviours when he became aware that he was considered merely the husband of a famous poetess. He also lapsed into the fraudulence of blackmail and embezzlement, obliging his students at the conservatory to lavish on him conspicuous sums of money in order to obtain promotions.

Victor Cousin was, in contrast and with the true nobility of a gentleman, a man of dignity, of worth, consecrated to study, to philosophical research, to academic teaching. An authoritative spirit, a revered intellectual, a distinguished master, an excellent teacher. But his ideas, his labour, his republicanism constrained him to sacrifices and mortifications, so that with the changing times Victor had neither the shrewdness nor the cunning nor the prudence to adapt himself to history, which moved forward imposing a new path, one which enjoined a new order of things.

Victor believed firmly – and foolishly, within the conceptual utopia of the philosopher – in historicism. He believed in its eclecticism. He believed in Immanuel Kant of Konigsberg and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz of Leipzig. He believed in his Du Vrai, du Bien, du Beau, but he held any recompense in the form of money or privilege offered to him to be indecorous and shameful. Eighteen fifty-one and the Second Empire were, for him, rash symptoms of history. Thus, as an aged professor, he was forced to beg for economic tranquillity and decorous teaching. And he kept busy, in order to forget affronts and acts of disrespect, in lugubrious and unmannerly soliloquies of philosophical architecture.

Hippolyte and Victor, even though they ignored each other and frequented each other rarely, had much in common. If they had seen something of each other and had known each other better, they would have come to an understanding. They were brothers in simple-mindedness, inconclusiveness, modesty. They fought shy of important friendships and any social influences whatever, they imposed futile values which were enriched nevertheless by the prestige of a notable frequenting and by the conversation of the literary salons.

Hippolyte followed one road, Victor another, leaving me alone to confront tough adversaries, individuals thirsty for fatuous glory and for prestige purchased at low price, all in all scoundrels without scruples.

Hippolyte drowned himself in discouragement and illness. Victor lost himself in solitude.

Infirmity was for Hippolyte a pretext for authenticating moral blackmail, for imposing his emotional despotism, for adeptly wasting time among uncontrolled outbursts of anger and silent accusatory sulking. He had no words of gratitude for whomever helped him charitably, for whomever offered him help without claiming anything in return, for whomever advised him without giving weight to open and bleeding moral wounds.

Hippolyte slowly fell into a woeful, cruel, inhuman indolence. Day after day, his body appeared more bent, his gait more hesitating and insecure, his movements more encumbered and slow, incapacitated by shooting pains, by uncontrolled trembling, by a cough which lacerated his lungs. To die because he wanted to die. And Hippolyte played skilfully with the many wounds of his body and his soul. Desperation, all in all!

I gave myself up to helping him. I underwent abuse and vexation when I welcomed him once more into my house, offered him comfort and supported him in irresponsible manias, in pretentious and insensate solicitations. I helped him in his agony even though henceforth I had no tie that constrained me to involve myself closely with his infirmity, his body given over to corruption, his mind clouded by confusion. The separation of many years had given us different life choices. For me, this had been very healthful. Hippolyte died on 21 April 1851.

Victor also slowly became a stranger to me: an old man, stubborn and irresponsible, basking in the past splendour of maître à penser, an old republican intellectual. Out of false self-love and misguided modesty, he broke off all links with the external world. He broke off our affectionate relations to redefine a friendship based only on reciprocal esteem.

He put forward puerile excuses, accused me of arrogance that profaned his virtues, blamed me for a language unsuitable for a woman and a poetess, for slang expressions, for incorrect, unseemly, scandalous phonemes. Infantile accusations in insisting on rights for glances more tender now that nothing remains16.

I found myself once more alone, with my daughter Henriette. A new father, in the interim – Gustave, in fact! Yes, Monsieur Gustave Flaubert: your dear friend, Max – eager for unsuspected attentions, seemed to want to raise her attentively. It seemed that he wanted to adopt her, with exceptional affection and eager and loving attention.

He deceived me, equivocated in a trivial way, committed painful errors, put forward perceptions which were divergent, well-concealed, indolent. A further wound lacerated my sentiments. An indelible scar marred relations which had been solid, secure, sincere. A rejection finally outraged my dignity as a woman, created a brazen violation, a dishonourable rape of time and affection.

Mantes, la Medunta, la Jolie shone forth meanwhile like the citadel of love, of inviolable sentiments, of secure tenderness, intimate, enveloping, there on the right bank of the Seine, with the fountain of place de l’Hôtel de Ville, the tower of St. Maclou, the church of Notre-Dame, the place de la République and the Hôtel du Grand-Cerf. Mantes was the custodian of our intimacy when we still loved each other, on and on, when we had enjoyed sublime pleasures … and Gustave was proud of what he had been saying, and that is that I had never before enjoyed such happiness17.

Mantes, that lovely hotel in Mantes, a white inn which had as its sign a roebuck painted on a banner, became the painful open wound of verses written in the joy of the moment, in the ardour of turbulent and excited senses: Two tongues in the same mouth / mingled with seductive licking / our united bodies seemed to want to shatter the bed / below our ardent outbursts / … / oh, bed, if you could speak!

I let myself be bewitched by a man without scruples, without love because the grotesque aspect of love prevented him from abandoning himself, as he thought of the strange face that he must have in those moments18. And that man, in love with himself, persevered for years in making fun of me, in dragging me into ridicule, in abandoning me and taking me up again, in running off to the Orient with you, his friend, my dear Maxime.

I had self-respect, and that preserved me from becoming a woman offended by a shameful and dishonest rejection, without resistance. I had the wisdom to render honour to myself, more than he would have done. I had the good taste to cede to that individual only a part of myself, I reserved the privilege to reject and the wisdom to renounce frenetic, illicit, licentious, immoral sensualities.

When my senses led me to sublime ecstasy, I abandoned myself, with propriety and intimate virtue, to narrating my melancholies to myself. Not a single gesture, not an action, not an overture which was contemptible towards that man. I conceded my love – it’s true, I dreamed of a love, I shared a love in order to recover that human warmth that Hippolyte and Victor had mislaid, amidst meanness and personal advantage. I asked very little of Gustave, only tenderness and understanding. I was overwhelmed by emotional bullying and by the indecent irascibility of the character of a misanthrope.

I allowed myself to be compliant to his will. I went so far as to let myself be bent to the will of others, renouncing my own rights. I confided my intentions and purposes to convince Gustave to listen to me, to sustain me, to comfort me. It wasn’t easy for me to throw away my life as a poetess, as a Parisian, as an intellectual. However, I was ready for anything. I made no mystery of my intentions, of my desires.

I opened my heart to him, confessing to him that I would have liked to live – in the circumstances of the moment, in the uncertainties of life, in the inability to be understood – Yes! I would have liked to live in some village (near Rouen) to work, to raise my daughter, to be at his disposition – because this would have been my happiness if he loved me19.

Monsieur Gustave Flaubert was sceptical, he had compassion only for himself, for his adored mother. I was ready for sacrifices and privations in order to remain near him, to look after him, to support any trouble of his. He dismissed me clumsily, as one would dismiss a domestic without justification, without motive, without a reason which might be acceptable. He showed me the door as he would have done with an Oriental courtesan.

Croisset buzzed in a summer night. It was June 1851. I had arrived unexpectedly at Gustave’s house to heal deep wounds, to try to understand his intentions, to beg him – if it were necessary – to heed my cry of pain, my suffering as a woman and as a mother, my desire to satisfy the legitimate wish to live beside him.

I didn’t try to force time and destiny. I didn’t try to violate any familiar intimacy. I didn’t want to make him pity me. I didn’t have, above all – never, never, believe me Max! – the pretension of making myself accepted in his house, as his woman.

The lies of this man are shameless, false, irritating. He accused me of hidden manoeuvres; with impunity he persuaded friends and acquaintances of his interpretation of the facts to the point of arguing, with the falsity typical of him, that I wanted – yes! – that I wanted to constrain him to present me to his mother and to introduce me into his house in order to obtain the position that he believed I expected in his life.

Gustave refused to receive me that evening, at Croisset. Our missives – carried out in a dialogue which was strained, tense, at times cruel – seemed to exhaust themselves in commonplace and vulgar replies, through the perorations of servants appointed to safeguard his privacy. Gustave first of all deliberately ignored my clarificatory note, then shamelessly disappeared when, taking risks and chances, I tried to inform him of my legitimate reasons. Then, thoughtlessly and inconsiderately, he allowed himself to be surprised alone in an angle of the park. And there were the lindens, the calm shadows of the twilight, the intense perfume of a summer evening beguiled by the rippling of the river.

Vis-à-vis then, I begged him for explanations that might help me to understand his senseless behaviour. I set forth arguments, I demanded justifications for his secrecy, his counterfeit reluctance, his incivility. He scrutinized me, at the same time avoiding my glance. He pronounced few words – timorous, embarrassed: Madame, he declaimed, with awkwardness, I will see you at your hotel at 8 o’clock. A Gustave without wits, spellbound by dishonest scruples. A Gustave who was reckoning up memories gone astray in ambiguous sensuality, in stories experienced on the far banks of a sacred river, beyond the Nile, beyond cities, dragomen, sailors, almées of every race and kind, beyond temples contaminated by sand, where a singing melot evoked the signs of time, his pilgrimage to Mecca.

Nostalgia and recollections defined also by the penetrating odours of noisy brothels, by the scents of lightly touched bodies sprinkled with unguents, perfumed oils and balsams, by nocturnal languors, by the frenetic rhythms of drumbeats, by excited senses dazzled by a golden sun.

Gustave wished to preserve the memory only of his fleeting love. His heart had a place only for Koutchouk-Hanem, the almée who had offered him her majestic body, her bed, an entire night there, at Esneh. Had Gustave really known the body of that woman?

Mantes had been forgotten by then.

Adieu, Mantes, adieu Hôtel du Grand-Cerf, adieu 29 July 1848. There remained Croisset, its obsessive presence, its perfidious guests, with its lacerating dailiness, with its lugubrious imprisonment. Madame Anne-Justine-Caroline Flaubert, née Fleuriot, kept watch over the destiny of her son, of her Gustave.

Gustave’s memory became, with time, the memory of Madame Flaubert: the dear old lady, the poor much-beloved one, the poor adored one, the poor, very dear, old lady. Madame appointed herself the guardian of every sentiment, so that Croisset would be the sanctuary of acquiescence, of silence, of the immutability of feelings.

And even of Love! Amidst embraces, caresses and kisses between the everlasting child Gustave and his mother. This in the summers, in the warm afternoons in the shadows of the lindens, Madame sat on a bench and spoke of things, of persons, of her memories, and thus cancelled all present time, enveloped in melancholy a reality which was vanishing forever.

And Gustave, always like a little child, played the part of a loving son, full of attention, of affection. He ran to his dear-dear-dear mamma to tell her about his life, his loves, his secrets, his fantasies. Conversations that were solitary, confessional, ambiguous, so that tenderness took the upper hand amidst embraces and kisses exchanged a thousand times, a thousand times received and given.

Croisset inviolable and unviolated. Gustave and his mother celebrated their rituals without importunate interferences, without extraneous meddling, without irritating intrusions. Croisset was not and is not Mantes, it was not and is not a room in the Hôtel du Grand-Cerf, it is not a bed perfumed with bodies fulfilling themselves with all the delights of the flesh without pretending, in the desire of an overwhelming passion.

Croisset was not and certainly is not the spacious hall where, enveloped in the scent of resin and honey, on a purple rug with golden fringes, an almée would have danced, ennobling her lascivious and provocative body. Croisset was and is the delirium of agony, far from the desert where Gustave had dragged his soul, had captured the assassin of his youth in his horrible barbarity.

Meanwhile the ghizeh cuts through the waters, barely wrinkled with tepid puffs of wind, besieged by the cries of birds, and Esneh draws nearer. The noble kite rises up in flight. Perhaps also the cormorant, the duck, the teal, the flamingo, the peacock. Now, at dawn, the ravenous howling of the jackal breaks out menacingly in the ruins of the temples, and the date-palms make a hissing sound, caressed by the first heat of the day which stripes the sky with azure, which brushes with ochre the tranquil waters of the Nile. A woman weeps, and Sirius, the star of Isis, covers me with its veil of spouse, of mother, of lover, awaiting a truth which could be discovered at Esneh, from Koutchouk-Hanem perhaps.

Farewell, farewell my dear friend.

With unchanging gratitude,

Louise Colet

24 June 1870

Madame Colet,

We have acted according to your wishes, and as rapidly as possible. Delays and unforeseen events are not due to negligence on our part, nor to specific intentions. For the rest, His Highness Isma’il Pasha and your illustrious fellow-countryman, the Viscount Ferdinand Marie de Lesseps, have supported your application with resolution and determination, and we could not be indifferent in the face of such commanding exhortations. Thus we have been able to move forward with all our energy, with all our investigative resources, with all our knowledge. The question that you have put before us has become the principal motivation for our operations and it has brought matters to a conclusion in the best possible manner, indeed the only possible manner.

In truth, we were initially surprised by your unusual request, then, compromised by contingencies and happenings of which we gradually became aware, we became participants, in the first person and in a suggestive manner, in the circumstances you told us about and of which we made ourselves aware. Thus, we spared neither energy nor minutes, so that once and for all the truth on these matters could be recognized and seen as valid questions which had, on various occasions and in a manifest manner, involved and disturbed you.

We must confess to you, in all frankness and good faith, that while we were proceeding with the investigation we often asked ourselves with a pinch of Oriental malice why you, Madame Louise Colet – illustrious Poetess of France, a woman born a daughter of Apollo, a woman with the appearance of Venus, a woman who had the daring to write the splendid composition Le Monument de Molière, a woman singled out at least four times for the poetry prize awarded by the French Academy – manifested such careful diligence and solicitude regarding what traces could be discovered of a certain man and a certain woman who, by good luck or sheer chance, had encountered each other in our country about twenty years ago. A meeting which had been the preamble to an overwhelming night of love marked by a passionate exaltation of the senses: as to the fucks: all of the best quality, the third assault was brutal, the last the most sentimental (exchanging) infinite affections so that (we embraced each other) with sadness and love20. Hence, your desire to know the destiny of such individuals, their next movement, their present residence, is eccentric and extravagant. But we are attentive to your suggestive request and to your unusual desire.

And so we have retraced itineraries, interrogated persons, visited places, inspected maps and notebooks so that we might be able to furnish you with the information you seek, above all on what happened on the night between 6 and 7 March 1850 in a modest mud house, there amidst the scents of sandalwood, a humble bazaar for merchandise, a café, a mosque, dovecotes. I am speaking of the small city of Esneh in Upper Egypt, flanked by an embankment and set apart from the negligence of a jumble of shacks and wild and domesticated rams, by luxuriant palm-groves and by the remains of a temple, its twenty-four columns lending it an aura of charm.

We investigated then, and with noteworthy scrupulousness, the past of those figures about whom you have requested stories and accounts of their relations and histories, that is of that man and woman. We sought to have at our disposal elements that would be useful, enabling you, Madame, to decipher in all their possible veracity both the remote and recent past of these people, enabling you to understand the existence that they have led, their present occupations and entanglements, above and beyond everything else that might be instrumental to gratify any appreciable indiscretion.

It appeared to us supremely opportune and convenient to dig up facts and events which have involved these two individuals, also because you, illustrious poetess, have refrained from making mention – we do not know if by deliberate discretion or from actual forgetfulness – of any possible relations you have had and shared with them. If, indeed, there ever were such rapports, such as relations, mutual influence, connections of any kind.

In your invitation to us to undertake these investigations you, Madame, have in any case, albeit with wise sagacity and virginal blushes, given support to the suspicion that the man is not completely foreign to you or, at least – so we have believed ourselves to understand – he has had with you occasional rapports or perhaps chance meetings. It thus seemed probable to suppose that you had experienced displeasing annoyances, perhaps even moral attacks, perhaps even harassing and aggressive molestations – even considerably before that fateful year, 1850.

In regard to the woman, we have had from you, Madame Colet, only inadequate and approximate indications and traces. It is true that we were dealing with a person of dubious morality, and she confirmed it to us with words of contempt and infamy, words that her station makes it permissible to render publicly. A person willing to welcome adventurers of every class and country sailing along the Nile, who perhaps was by profession a dancer, perhaps a courtesan, perhaps – it cannot be excluded – a khaonal, a transvestite engaged in prostitution.