A Journey into

Flaubert’sNormandy

ARTPLACE SERIES

Roaring Forties Press1053 Santa Fe AvenueBerkeley, California 94706

All rights reserved; first published in 2007.Copyright © 2007 by Susannah PattonPrinted in Hong Kong

Ebook ISBN 978-0982341032ISBN 978-0976670681

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataPatton, Susannah, 1964-

A journey into Flaubert's Normandy / Susannah Patton.p. cm. -- (ArtPlace series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-09766706811. Flaubert, Gustave, 1821-1880—Homes and haunts—France—Normandy. 2. Authors,

French—Homes and haunts—France—Normandy. 3. Normandy (France)—Intellectual life—19th century. 4. Normandy (France)—In literature. 5. Normandy (France)—Description andtravel. I. Title.

PQ2247.P38 2006843'.8--dc22[B]

2006031261

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without first obtaining the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

To Chris, Sam, and Tommy,fellow Normandy explorers

FrontMatter_FINAL 11/22/06 8:16 AM Page ii

Contents

Acknowledgments vii

1. Gustave Flaubert: Normandy’s Novelist 2

2. Rouen: Norman Capital 14

3. Trouville: Footprints in the Sand 42

4. The Hermit of Croisset 64

5. Ry and Lyons-la-Forêt: The Land of Emma Bovary 82

6. Pont-l’Evêque: “Thus it is with all our dreams” 102

Timeline 121

Notes 124

For Further Reading 132

Index 134

Credits 142

About the Author 144

About the ArtPlace Series 145

Chapter 1

Gustave FlaubertNormandy’s Novelist

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On September 19, 1851, Gustave Flaubertstarted what many consider to be hismasterpiece: Madame Bovary. Ensconcedin his family home on the banks of theSeine, just outside of the city of Rouen

in the French region of Normandy, he worked on the manuscript for the next four and a half years, laboringin isolation to write and rewrite what would becomeone of the first modern novels.

Flaubert had just returned from a two-year voyage tothe Middle East and southern Europe with a closefriend, Maxime Du Camp—the longest and farthest heever ventured from his native Normandy—and he wasinitially unsure what he would write next. But evenafter this exotic journey, which he hoped would influence his work, he found the subject for his novelin the small-town Normandy that he knew intimately.

While he had been away, the local community hadbeen scandalized by the tale of a doctor’s wife,Delphine Delamare, who—so the story goes—poisonedherself at the age of twenty-seven after boredom withsmall-town life and her husband’s mediocrity drove herto adultery and extravagant spending that led to debt.Her husband, who had been blind to her behavior,soon died as well, leaving behind their young daughterin the small Normandy town of Ry. Louis Bouilhet, aclose friend and literary confidant, urged Flaubert toturn this drama into a novel.

Flaubert later declared that Madame Bovary was purefabrication. Its setting, however—rural Normandy,

Flaubert refused for many years to have hispicture taken or his portrait painted, but heyielded as he approached middle age.

Dawn near Pont-l’Evêque and theGeffosses farm, in the north of Normandy.Flaubert’s family owned the farm, whichhe often visited as a child.

Be regular and orderly in your life so that youmay be violent and original in your work.

— Gustave Flaubert

A Journey into Flaubert’s Normandy

with its farms and small towns—was real, and one withwhich he was well acquainted.

After the novel was published, Flaubert was chargedwith obscenity and brought to trial. He was lateracquitted, but many Normans were horrified by hisdescription of marital infidelity and hypocrisy in theirregion. In Madame Bovary and his other works, Flaubert

revealed a love-hate relationship with the traditionaland sometimes stifling mores of his slice of provincialnorthern France.

Growing up in Rouen, the onetime capital ofNormandy, the writer developed a scorn for all that was“bourgeois,” a term that for him referred less to socialclass and more to a close-minded, bigoted view of theworld. For him, Rouen represented bourgeois society inits purest form. “Oh how I’d rather live in Spain, Italy,or even Provençe,” he wrote to a boyhood friend,Ernest Chevalier, upon returning to Rouen from a tripto the south of France in 1840.

Throughout his life, however, Flaubert was faithful toNormandy. He was born and died there, and apart fromoccasional trips to the exotic Orient and jaunts toParis, he rarely left the verdant region. While hecriticized the repressive bourgeois attitudes, he alsotook inspiration from the beauty of this region’spastoral rolling hills, apple orchards, and seascapes.

Flaubert’s Normandy, which cuts a swath from Rouenwestward and northward through the Calvados regioninto countryside known as the Pays d’Auge, andnorthward to the Pays de Caux and the Côte Fleurie(Flower Coast), is filled with well-known sites such asRouen’s famous cathedral and the fabled Trouvillebeach. But it is also home to out-of-the-way villages,tightly knit farming communities, and hidden valleys.It is a region known for apple cidre, Calvados brandy,and aromatic Normandy cheeses, which small farmersstill labor to produce. Indeed, two weeks before hisdeath, Flaubert told his niece Caroline, “Sometimes I think I’m liquefying like an old Camembert.”

In addition to cheese, Normandy is known for itsdampness, but travelers in this sometimes drearyclimate are rewarded with the brilliant green of the

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The west façade of the Cathédrale Notre-Dame, which dominatesthe center of Rouen. Much of the cathedral was built in the Norman gothic style in the thirteenth century.

Gustave Flaubert: Normandy’s Novelist

5

hills and explosions of spring wildflowers. Storms movequickly across the English Channel, bringing heavydownpours that alternate with bright sunshine in thespace of an afternoon. Flaubert recognized that the wetclimate had an effect on the psyche, as he worked onhis books in his family’s damp house on the banks ofthe Seine. “If my book is any good it will tickle many a feminine wound,” he wrote just after Madame Bovary was published. “One or two will smile whenthey recognize themselves. I will have known your sufferings, poor obscure souls, damp from your stifledsorrow, like your provincial backyards, where the mossgrows on the walls.”

The “Novelist’s Novelist”Flaubert was not a prolific writer, publishing only fournovels, three short stories, and one play in his career.

Although he achieved some renown during his lifetime,he was recognized as great and influential only after hisdeath in 1880. Since then, Normandy has claimed himas its most famous literary figure. Visitors to the areacan track down his various homes, some of which arenow museums, and trace his path through the smalltowns, farms, and coastline.

Flaubert’s influence, however, has spread far beyond his native province and his country. Henry James called Flaubert “the novelist’s novelist,” and writersfrom Marcel Proust to Mario Vargas Llosa haveacknowledged their indebtedness to his literary style.These writers took inspiration from Flaubert’s continualsearch for le mot juste (the precise word) and hisdetailed observation of everyday life.

Unlike his predecessors, Flaubert declined to judge hischaracters and sought to remove the author from the

narrative, leaving the reader tomake up his or her own mindabout the morality of his stories.In portraying scenes of daily lifein small Norman towns andbeyond, he sought to tell thetruth, even if the harsh, realisticscenes were disturbing.

Although he is credited withlaying the groundwork for themodern novel, Flaubert’s workalso reflects his love of historyand of the classics. Shakespeareand Cervantes were his literaryheroes, and as a young man he devoured the works ofRomantic writers, includingJohann Wolfgang von Goethe,Lord Byron, and Victor Hugo.

Small farms dot thecountryside near Ry.

A Journey into Flaubert’s Normandy

In 1842, however, at the age of twenty, Flaubertsubmitted to the wishes of his father, the chief surgeonat Rouen’s city hospital, and began professional studiesat law school in Paris. But he showed no interest in and little aptitude for the law, and in 1844 his studieswere cut short by a health crisis that would change the course of his life. While driving a two-wheeledcabriolet with his brother along a dark country roadnear Pont-l’Evêque on a January evening, Flaubert felt“a torrent of flames . . . sudden as lightning . . . aninstantaneous interruption of memory.” It seemed as if,he later wrote, “everything in your head is going off atonce like a thousand fireworks.” He lost consciousnessand fell to the floor of the carriage. It was his firstattack of epilepsy.

Seeking calm for Gustave, the family soon moved toCroisset, and Dr. Flaubert conceded that a life of lawwould be too demanding for his suddenly fragile son.Gustave was delighted to finally have an excuse to livethe quiet life of a writer that he craved. “My illness hasbrought one benefit, in that I am allowed to spend mytime as I would like, a great thing in life,” he wrote to aschool friend in January 1845.

Flaubert would, from then on, have a hard time leavinghis riverside Norman home. In letters to his closefriends and his lover during an eight-year period,Flaubert voiced disgust with his native region andpromised on several occasions to move to Paris,although he never did. “Why have I stayed in this

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FRANCE

Normandy Paris

N

Caen

Cabourg

RouenRy

Croisset

Lisieux

Pont Audmer

Honfleur

Barentin

Yvetot Forges- les-Eaux

Bernay

Le Havre

Trouvi lle

English Channel

Seine RiverD 513

D 514

N 158

D 925A 29

N 13

A 28

A 29

A 13

Lyons-la-Foretˆ

Pont l’ Evequeˆ

Gustave Flaubert: Normandy’s Novelist

provincial backwater?” he asked his close friend DuCamp in 1851. “Must one not follow one’s own path?”He was also an avid traveler who took great pleasure in his trips to Corsica, Italy, and the Middle East, andeven treks around less distant regions such as Brittanyand the south of France. In the end, however, it was a life of relative seclusion—broken by visits from members of his close literary circle and thecompanionship of his mother and his motherless niece,Caroline—that suited him best. “I live alone like abear,” he declared in 1845.

Alone in his study,writing into the earlyhours of the morning,Flaubert set to work tocreate his great novels.Along with Stendhal,who published The Redand the Black in 1830,and Honoré de Balzac,who wrote a series ofnovels under the titleThe Human Comedy,Flaubert is consideredto be one of thecreators of literaryrealism. Emile Zola, hisfriend and protégé,carried on the tradition.Flaubert rejectedmembership in anyschool, however, sayingthat he strove only toachieve “beauty,” andhis novels sometimesoscillate betweenrealism andromanticism.

Flaubert’s LandscapeFlaubert spent most of his working life at his family’smanor just outside of Rouen, but he felt equally athome on the beaches of Trouville, the farmland surrounding Pont-l’Evêque, the chalky plateaunorthwest of Rouen, or retracing the narrow streets of his native city.

A journey through the landscape that shaped Flaubert’slife and work begins in his birthplace, the port city

of Rouen, an ancient city madeprosperous over the centuries by thefree flow of trade along the Seinefrom the English Channel to Paris.The city was also hit hard over the years by the plague and othercontagious maladies imported alongwith valuable goods. To take care ofthe hordes of sick citizens, the citybuilt a large religious hospital, theHôtel Dieu, near the great cathedral.

Flaubert and his two siblings,Achille and Caroline, spent theirearliest years living in a wing of thishospital (which had by then movedacross town), where their fatherpracticed surgery. Dr. Flaubert’sdissection room looked out on thefamily’s garden, and Gustave and hissister would climb a trellis to viewthe corpses. Images from the hospitaland from his father’s practice emergefrequently in Flaubert’s work, mostnotably in Madame Bovary, in whichhe describes the professional life andmisfortunes of a country doctor indetail.

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The beach at Trouville.

A Journey into Flaubert’s Normandy

In July 1836, just before his fifteenth birthday, Flaubertvacationed with his family in the resort town ofTrouville, a fishing village on the Normandy coast thatwas becoming increasingly popular with Parisians for itslong, wide, sandy beaches and dramatic cliff walks. Achance meeting that summer on a Trouville beach witha married, older woman sparked Flaubert’s first greatlove—albeit unrequited—and served as the inspirationfor Madame Arnoux, the central character in his novelSentimental Education.

Trouville, which sits across the river from its sister city, Deauville, got its start as a literary and artisticdestination in the early nineteenth century, whenwriter Alexander Dumas came to stay and encouraged

his Parisian friends to join him.Painters Corot, Boudin, Monet, andPissarro later came to paint itsseascapes and cliffs. The ancientoyster-fishing village gradually tookon glamour as the nineteenthcentury progressed, especially aftertrain service from Paris began.

In April 1844, Flaubert’s fatherbought an eighteenth-century house at Croisset, just a few milesdownstream from Rouen along theSeine. Flaubert was recovering fromhis first attack of epilepsy and hadabandoned his law studies in Paris.From 1851 to his death in 1880, hislife and the inspiration for much ofhis work would revolve around hisclose relatives in the region and thehouse at Croisset.

Although much of Croisset was laterdestroyed to build a factory, visitors

come regularly to view the pavilion that remains and tostroll along the Seine near where Flaubert spent muchof his life. The pavilion now houses a small Flaubertmuseum, which looks lost amid the modern andindustrial development that has transformed the villageover the past century.

Flaubert never lived in the town of Ry, but this quietcountry town—just fifteen minutes south of the busycenter of Rouen—considers itself the real-life Yonville-l’Abbaye, the fictional town that is the setting forMadame Bovary. In fact, the Bovary connection hasbecome the town’s main industry, with the supposedhomes of the Delamares/Bovarys preserved as museums,and a Bovary Gallery complete with dramatizations of

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This small pavilion in Croisset is all that remains of the Flaubert family’s property.