Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris by Peter Brooks

Author:Peter Brooks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2017-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

“It doesn’t matter. We will have loved each other well.”

“Without belonging to one another, however!”

“Perhaps it is better that way,” she replied.

“No, no! What happiness we would have had!”

Her future perfect (“We will have loved each other well”) is matched by his past conditional (“What happiness we would have had”). Love is something like the socialist dream, never there in the right place at the right time.

The novel ends with Frédéric and Deslauriers reunited—his marriage to Louise ended with her elopement with a singer—and sitting by the fire, recalling the past and the fates of their friends. They sum up their lives, recognizing that they have both been failures. They reach back to their schooldays in Nogent and their youthful ambitions: “And, exhuming their youth, at each sentence they said to one another, ‘Do you remember?’” An exhumation, then, of something dead and buried. Their memories lead them back to the summer of 1837, and their attempted visit to the brothel of La Turque, which ended in failure when Frédéric, floral bouquet in hand, embarrassed by the view of so many women at his disposal, and thinking they were mocking him, turned and ran—and, since Frédéric had the money, Deslauriers was obliged to follow him. We are told this became a story that still was not forgotten three years later—and in fact it is alluded to in the first chapter of the novel, as Frédéric and Deslauriers, meeting again in September 1840, when the novel opens, notice the red light burning on the house of ill repute. And the novel ends on the exchange that many critics found shockingly cynical. After recounting the episode “prolixly” to one another, Frédéric remarks: “That’s the best we ever had!” And Deslauriers responds: “Yes, maybe so? That’s the best we ever had!”

Designating a youthful (failed) visit to a brothel “the best” life has brought them shocked the critics, who were in any case generally appalled by a book that offered no “hero” at its core and no explicit illumination by life’s experiences. Perhaps even more notable than the subject matter of this episode is its temporal status. Frédéric and Deslauriers tell us that the most important experience of their lives happened three years before the novel opened, indicating that everything we have read in this long novel has been somehow off target, mere sequel to the important but unrecorded event. But of course that event takes on its importance only in the two friends’ retrospect. At the time, it was an unfulfilled desire that looked forward to many imagined future fulfillments. Seen in narrative retrospect after a life of failed hopes and ambitions, it bathes in the special glow of memory, and of storytelling. In fact, if there is one act or emotion that seems to survive the general wreckage of Sentimental Education, it may be storytelling itself, the play of recollection and understanding on the past—a past that cannot be altered, only retold for a present experience of pleasure. It is always too late to change anything: the past is inalterable, and only telling can redeem it.

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