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SIMPLE HEARTS

In the autumn of 1875, Gustave Flaubert suspended his Herculean labors on Bouvard and Pécuchet to write three stories about saints. They were published together in April of 1877 under the title Trois Contes. The finest and strangest of these stories he wrote for his friend George Sand, who never stopped pleading with him to mitigate his customary bleakness a little and write “a work marked by compassion”—and “A Simple Heart” (Un coeur simple) is certainly so marked, although not in any way that George Sand would have recognized. Set in the early years of the nineteenth century, in the bleak, provincial milieu around Pont-l’Évêque and Trouville (only a few miles from Flaubert’s home at Croisset), “A Simple Heart” tells the story of Félicité, an isolated, illiterate, Catholic house-servant; it narrates her life from birth to death as a poised, sotto voce litany of labor and loss, of emotional neglect and wasted time that dissolves, suddenly, in the last sentence of the story, into this dazzling image of mercy—a vision of grace as gaudy and permissive as a Tiepolo ceiling.

Eighty years after Flaubert finished writing “A Simple Heart” in provincial France, I finished reading it in provincial Texas, sitting in the wooden swing on the shady porch of my grandparents’ house in south Fort Worth, and, having finished it, Flaubert’s story, which had transported me out of the present, delivered me back into it with sharpened awareness. I can still remember the hard angle of the morning light and the smell of cottonseed in the lazy air as I sat there on the swing with my forearms on my knees and Trois Contes between my hands, amazed that writing could do what it had just done.

Since I was reading not just as a reader, but as a reader who wanted to be a writer, I also felt a glimmer of insight into a question that had troubled me since I had read Madame Bovary and Salammbo in quick succession, as Flaubert wrote them. Why, I wondered, would the cold-eyed master of Madame Bovary, the scourge of provincial ennui (whose consequences I felt qualified to judge) have abandoned that worthy project to write a romance of Mediterranean antiquity? Why would he have barricaded himself with books and dreams in the study of his mother’s house, out there amidst the fields of mud and vegetables, to reimagine the oriental glamour of ancient Carthage?

To what end? I wondered, and, now, in the tiny apotheosis at the end of “A Simple Heart,” I saw a door opening between the two books—between the banality of Madame Bovary and the splendor of Salammbo—and I understood, if only vaguely, something about writing and what it does in the world. Since then, I have come to regard “A Simple Heart” as Flaubert’s great allegory of his own vocation—and have always assumed that if Madame Bovary is none other than Flaubert as a fool in abjection, as he himself suggested, the servant Félicité is almost certainly Flaubert as a saint in glory, rising up, in the final moments of the story, out of the banality of his home country into the opening wings of this dazzling, improbable parrot.

The tacit parallel between Flaubert’s endeavors and those of his character, I think, may be inferred from the peculiarities of tense and tone that complicate “A Simple Heart”—more certainly since, given Flaubert’s methods, we may presume that these peculiarities are far from inadvertent. In two passages describing the local landscape, for instance, Flaubert slips abruptly into the present tense. This jolts in French, but it has the effect of collapsing the distance between Flaubert and his narrative by substituting the voice of Gustave, the local citizen, for that of Flaubert, the all-seeing author. A similar collapse of authorial distance occurs in those moments when Flaubert’s cool narration of Félicité’s existence suddenly glitters with sophisticated contempt. In these passages, I suspect, the cosmopolitan Flaubert wants to remind us that, even though he can forgive Félicité’s provincial innocence, he cannot forgive his own lost innocence in her—for they are two in one.

Considering Félicité as a character in a story, then, it helps to think of her as Flaubert’s Job, a character equally afflicted, yet bereft of Job’s anger at the injustice of his afflictions. Because, although Félicité suffers, she never feels that she is suffering injustice. Things are stolen from her that she never suspects are hers to claim. Her family abandons her, then exploits her. She doesn’t even notice. Her only beau humiliates her, then abandons her. She accepts the rejection and seeks no further. Her employer, a provincial widow, underpays her and treats her like a domestic animal. She is grateful for the shelter. She goes to church and prays for everyone.

Beyond this, Flaubert would have us understand, the entire society of Félicité’s adult life consists of two relationships with children (who die in childhood) and a single comforting embrace from her employer (which is never repeated). First, Félicité becomes helplessly devoted to her employer’s daughter, Virginie. Then, when Virginie is sent off to school, she settles her devotion on her own nephew Victor, whose parents send him to visit Félicité with instructions to extort gifts from her—a packet of sugar, a loaf of bread. Young Victor, however, is soon sent off to sea, where he dies of yellow fever in the Americas, and, not long thereafter, Virginie dies of consumption while away at school. Both Félicité and her mistress are desolated, but their lives move on. The years pass quietly until, one summer afternoon, the two of them visit Virginie’s room, which has been left intact. They clean the shelves, reorder the toys, and refold the dead girl’s clothing. As Flaubert tells it:

The sun shone brightly on these shabby things, showing up the stains and creases caused by the movement of her body. The sun was warm, the sky blue, a blackbird trilled, every living thing seemed to be full of sweetness and light. They found a little hat made of furry brown plush; but it was all moth-eaten. Félicité asked if she might have it. Their eyes met, filled with tears; finally the mistress opened her arms, the servant fell into them; and they embraced, appeasing their grief in a kiss which made them equal.

It was the first time in their lives, for Madame Aubain was not naturally forthcoming. Félicité was as grateful to her as if she had received a gift, and from then on loved her with dog-like devotion and religious adoration.

This, in Flaubert’s telling, is the single moment of companionable human solace in Félicité’s existence. In its aftermath, Félicité embarks upon a career of kindness. She stands in the doorway dispensing cider to passing soldiers. She looks after cholera victims and Polish refugees, assists derelicts and attends to the dying; and it is in this section of the narrative (as is obvious above) that the tone goes strange, as if Flaubert, appalled by the image of his own vanquished innocence, cannot withhold his anger at the neediness of Félicité’s generosity—at the spectacle of her giving so much back in return for so little—and, finally, at the fact that nothing remains of Félicité’s life, as silence, darkness, and old age close around her, but the dubious companionship of a third-hand pet, an obnoxious parrot named Loulou.

Félicité, of course, is delighted with the parrot. She feeds it, pampers it, and teaches it to say “Hail Mary.” The parrot rebels, complains, tries to escape, and ultimately dies on the hearth, but this time Félicité has a response. She has the parrot stuffed, installs it in her room, and proceeds to worship it—to reconstruct it mentally as an embodiment of her loss and desire. At this point, the entire artifice of the narrative snaps into focus. It becomes clear that throughout the story Flaubert has been wholly devoted to explicating those attributes and significations that Félicité will ultimately invest in the parrot: The parrot’s gaudy wings are those of the Holy Spirit in stained glass; its truculent masculinity an attribute of her lost lover; its loveliness that of Virginie; and its American homeland an homage to her nephew Victor, who died there. The parrot embodies all of these attributes for Félicité, and thus, in the final scene of the story, she is reunited with all that she has lost, or never had—all those things she never knew she might deserve:

A cloud of blue incense smoke rose up to Félicité’s room. She opened wide her nostrils as she breathed in deeply, in an act at once sensual and mystical. She closed her eyes. Her lips smiled. Her heartbeats grew steadily slower, fainter every time, softer, like a fountain running dry, like an echo fading; and as she breathed her last, she thought she saw, as the heavens opened, a gigantic parrot hovering over her head.

This is splendid writing, of course, as plain and lovely here, in A.J. Krailsheimer’s English, as it is in Flaubert’s French. The dying fall of Félicité’s existence settles slowly toward inaudibility, then refuses to fade, and, in the last instant, blossoms forth in a crisp, unsentimental image of redemption. Most amazingly, however, through the evocation of this image, Flaubert manages the most elegant rhetorical maneuver available to writers on the page: He manages to do in the doing what he describes in the writing. In the act of describing Félicité’s secret construction of her loss and desire in the form of a parrot, Flaubert constructs his own parrot, publicly, in the form of a story that redeems Félicité’s isolation and his own—by narrating his own journey toward the business of making stories, embodying the attributes of his own loss and desire in Félicité’s story.

We know now, for instance, that in the telling of Félicité’s story, Flaubert reconstitutes his own romantic disasters and hapless, needy generosity—that he sets the story in his mother’s hometown and describes that world as he saw it—that he redacts the loss of his sister Caroline in the death of Virginie and describes Félicité struck down by a coachman’s whip at the very spot on the very road where he was first struck down by the epileptic illness that plagued his existence. And all of this is good to know, of course, but only insofar as it reinforces what we already know, which is that Flaubert was concerned most critically with socializing his parrot, with offering it up to us in public, not as an act of vanity or seduction, but as an emblem of what works of art might do in the world—how they might redeem isolation like Félicité’s by creating about them a confluence of simple hearts, a community united not in what they are—not in any cult of class, race, region, or ideology—but in the collective mystery of what they are not and now find embodied before them, like Félicité and Madame Aubain in the presence of that brown, plush hat.

Thus, when I finished reading “A Simple Heart” that morning in Texas, I did not retire to my couch to savor the experience. Nor did I pick up the copy of Bouvard and Pécuchet that lay on the corner of my desk with its pages still uncut. Nor did I start making notes for my own story in the manner of “A Simple Heart.” I started calling my friends. I wanted them to read the story immediately, so we could talk about it; and this rush to converse, it seems to me, is the one undeniable consequence of art that speaks to our desire. The language we produce before the emblem of what we are, what we know and understand, is always more considered. This language aims to teach, to celebrate our knowledge rather than our wonder. It also implies that we, and those like us, are at least as wonderful as the work we know so much about.

The language that we share before the emblem of what we lack, however, as fractious and inconsequent as it often seems, creates a new society. It is nothing more or less than the kiss that makes us equal—and had George Sand lived to read the story her friend wrote for her, I think she would have understood this. Or, more precisely, she would have felt the thorn in the rose her friend offered up to her and recognized, in the very title of the story, Un couer simple, a repudiation of le couer sensible (the feeling heart) that stood as an emblem for the cult of sensibilité of which Sand was the natural inheritor. As you will remember, this cult (or culture) of sensibilité defined virtue in terms of one’s superior ability to empathize with those less fortunate than one’s self. What those “less fortunates” might themselves have been feeling was (as W.H. Auden shrewdly pointed out) simply beside the point. Because then, as now, the cult of sensibilité defined itself as an aristocracy of feeling, wholly dedicated to the connoisseurship of its own virtuous empathy.

What Flaubert proposes in place of this refined aristocracy of virtuous identity—and what I continue to propose—is just democracy: a society of the imperfect and incomplete, whose citizens routinely discuss, disdain, hire, vote for and invest in a wide variety of parrots to represent their desires in various fields of discourse—who elect the representatives of their desire and occasionally re-elect them. Thus, unconcerned with class, culture, and identity, this society is perpetually created and re-created in non-exclusive, overlapping communities of desire that organize themselves around a multiplicity of gorgeous parrots. Unfortunately, this democracy of simple hearts is founded on the dangerous assumption that gorgeous parrots, hewn from what we lack (as Salammbo blossoms out to fill the arctic absences of Madame Bovary), will continue to make themselves visible and available to us. But this is not necessarily so. Flaubert is dead, and the disciplines of desire have lost their urgency in the grand salons of comfort and privilege we have created for the arts. The self-congratulatory rhetoric of sensibilité continues to perpetuate itself, and in place of gorgeous parrots, we now content ourselves with the ghostly successors of Marie Antoinette’s peasant village, tastefully installed within the walls of Versailles.