Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes

Author:Julian Barnes
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780307797858
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-06-01T10:00:00+00:00

8

The Train-spotter’s Guide to Flaubert

1 The house at Croisset – a long, white, eighteenth-century property on the banks of the Seine – was perfect for Flaubert. It was isolated, yet close to Rouen and thence to Paris. It was large enough for him to have a grand study with five windows; yet small enough for him to discourage visitors without obvious discourtesy. It gave him, too, if he wanted it, an unthreatened view of passing life: from the terrace he could train his opera glasses on the pleasure-steamers taking Sunday lunchers to La Bouille. For their part, the lunchers grew accustomed to cet original de Monsieur Flaubert, and were disappointed if they didn’t spot him, in Nubian shirt and silk skullcap, gazing back at them, taking the novelist’s view.

Caroline has described the quiet evenings of her childhood at Croisset. It was a curious ménage: the girl, the uncle, the grandmother – a solitary representative of each generation, like one of those squeezed houses you sometimes see with a single room on each storey. (The French call such a house un bâton de perroquet, a parrot’s perch.) The three of them, she recalled, would often sit at the balcony of the little pavilion and watch the confident arrival of the night. On the far bank they might just discern the silhouette of a straining horse on the tow-path; from nearby they might just hear a discreet splosh as the eel-fishermen cast off and slipped out into the stream.

Why did Dr Flaubert sell his property at Déville to buy this house? Traditionally, as a refuge for his invalid son, who had just suffered his first attack of epilepsy. But the property at Déville would have been sold anyway. The Paris-to-Rouen railway was being extended to Le Havre, and the line cut straight through Dr Flaubert’s land; part of it was to be compulsorily purchased. You could say that Gustave was shepherded into creative retreat at Croisset by epilepsy. You could also say he was driven there by the railway.

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