French Literature: A Very Short Introduction (13 page)

9. Engraving by Luc-Olivier Merson (1881) inspired by Victor Hugo's
novel Notre Dame de Paris (1831)

Heroes of the grotesque

The link between the grotesque and the medieval appears in
Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris (1831, fourteen years before the
restoration of the crumbling monument was undertaken, in
part because of the impact of Hugo's work) - a novel best known
in English as The Hunchback ofNotre Dame. Although Hugo
disapproved of the English title, because for him the cathedral
itself was the central character, the association of a deformed
body and a generous spirit in the fictive late 15th-century
bell-ringer Quasimodo provides one example of the doubleness
that the author so prized. The hunchback first appears in the
novel when a festive crowd decides to elect its own `pope of
fools' on the basis of the ugliest grimace. The contestants in turn
poke their faces through a broken circular window in a chapel
wall - thus, in effect, uniting the grimacing face with the stone
to suggest a gothic grotesque or gargoyle. Finally, a head appears
that is universally acclaimed. It is perfect: `But then surprise and
admiration reached their pinnacle. The grimace was his face.
Or rather, his whole body was a grimace' (Mais c'est alors que la
surpise et l'admiration furent a leur comble. La grimace etait son
visage. On plutot toute sa personne etait une grimace). This is
Quasimodo, who is both metonymically and metaphorically tied
to the cathedral itself: he is constantly present in the church, and
he is also similar to the building in its gothic aesthetic.

But the best-known dramatic example of this grotesque doubleness
is Lorenzaccio, Alfred de Musset's drama published seven
years after Hugo's preface to Cromwell. Neither Cromwell nor
Lorenzaccio were ever performed during their authors' lifetimes,
both were too incendiary by the standards of censorship of the
time, and both were, in their published form, considered impossible
to stage - Musset's play seems to require from sixty to a hundred
actors and extras. Musset based Lorenzaccio in part on a text by
his lover George Sand (Amandine Aurore Lucile Dupin, Baroness
Dudevant), a scene historique entitled Une conspiration en 1537.

Musset's work concentrates on the main hero's moral character,
which at first seems, both to the audience and to almost all of his
contemporaries within the play, to be entirely vicious. Completely
absorbed in the pleasures of drink and sex, Lorenzo serves as
procurer for his master and cousin, Alexandre, Duke of Florence,
for whom he quickly and skilfully acquires the sexual services of the
women of the city, by threats, promises, and money. A coward, he
never carries a sword and is called by the Duke himself afemmelette
(a `womanling') after Lorenzo faints when challenged to a duel.
As the scenes unfold, Lorenzaccio (the contemptuous form of the
name that the Florentines have given him) seems entirely to merit
everyone's scorn as bully, spy, toady, and coward. But then it appears
that Lorenzaccio's character has been deliberately assumed for the
purpose of killing Alexandre - in this way, Lorenzo would simply be
a highly successful actor, concealing a unified and noble self. What
makes Lorenzaccio fascinating to Musset, however, is something
much darker: Lorenzo, the originally pure, studious, idealistic
scholar of ancient Rome, who modelled himself on Lucius Junius
Brutus, the killer of Tarquin, is not merely feigning to be vicious but
rather he has really become Lorenzaccio.

Hugo's concept of a double man, both hideous and sublime, is
realized in Musset's hero, who has really become addicted to the
brutally licentious life while still aspiring to a heroic gesture of
political and personal purity. We are led to suppose that what we
have seen of Lorenzaccio in the first scene is not simply a feint but
a true expression of his own desires:

What is more curious for the connoisseur than to debauch an
infant? To see in a child of fifteen the future slut; to study, seed,
insinuate the thread of vice under the guise of a fatherly friend...

(Quoi de plus curieux pour le connaisseur que la debauche a la
mamelle? Voir dans une enfant de quinze ans la rouee a venir;
etudier, ensemencer, infiltrer paternellement le felon mysterieux du
vice dans le conseil dun ami...)

Disseminating corruption throughout the families of Florence
as within himself, Lorenzaccio has become such a cynic, or such
a realist, in regard to human nature that his intention to follow
through on his solitary plot to kill Alexandre has no connection
whatever with the anti-tyrannical agitation among certain
groups of Florentine families. In representing the character of
the Florentines - and through them, no doubt, his 19th-century
contemporaries - Musset shows that those who are outwardly
`noble' and quick to defend their honour are ineffectual.
Lorenzaccio, outwardly despicable, manages to achieve the death
of Duke Alexandre, though this really changes nothing. At the
end of the play, as at the beginning, the Florentines complain and
conspire, and life goes on as always.

The provincial life

The exasperated sense that heroic striving is vain, and that
the coarse, materialistic, conservative common sense of the
bourgeoisie will always triumph over those who seek something
more out of life often was embodied in the contrast between
fast-changing, fashionable Paris and the stodgy, rustic, and boring
provincial life. Balzac's immense collection of novels, which, in the
course of its evolution, he decided to call The Human Comedy (La
Comedie Humaine) is divided into various series and subseries
that reflect the importance of the Paris - province distinction,
such as the `Scenes of the life of the provinces' (Scenes de la vie de
province), the `Scenes of Parisian life', and `Scenes of country life'.
Yet the greatest hero to strive against the prison of the provincial
life is Emma Bovary, the protagonist of Gustave Flaubert's novel
Madame Bovary.

When it first appeared as a serial in 1856 in the Revue de Paris,
the work had the highly significant original title, Madame Bovary,
moeurs de province. For Emma, a woman more intelligent than any
of those around her, though with only a convent education, the most
powerful magic is contained in the words, `They do it in Paris!' (Cela se fait a Paris!), five words that suffice to propel her into the arms
of her second lover. Paris is for her the ultimate place of dreams,
though the dimension of place is insufficient without the figure of
an ideal role or persona. Flaubert's novel is full of representations
of the effect of representation, fictions that propel actions. Emma
delights in heroines who come to her from stories told by the
nuns, novels, magazines, and even from plates! As a child in the
convent, `they had supper on painted plates that depicted the story
of Mlle de La Valliere' (the young mistress of Louis XIV, who once
fled from the court to a convent). In her remote Norman village,
Emma receives magazines from Paris, and she reads the novels of
George Sand and Balzac. At one point, her mother-in-law tries to
keep her from reading novels - a hint that Emma is a latter-day
Don Quixote, maddened by reading. Her life cycles through fits of
intense energy and striving to make something of herself, followed
by periods of lethargy and sickness. This alternation contrasts with
provincial routine, so regular in its seasonal cycles that it seems
to be unchanged since time immemorial. Though she stands out
from her milieu - and thus permits Flaubert to create a multitude
of picturesque characters with all the acuity of a Dickens - Emma
is neither a person of great intelligence nor refinement. Her
unhappiness illustrates something said in Hugo's Notre Dame de
Paris, A one-eyed man is much more incomplete than a blind one.
He knows what he is missing' (Un borgne est Bien plus incomplet
qu'un aveugle. Il sait cc qui lui manque).

The view of la province conveyed in Flaubert (as in the novels
of Stendhal and Balzac) shows that the cult of nature and of
village life, so dear to followers of Rousseau and Bernardin de
Saint-Pierre, had by mid-century provoked a backlash. There
is nothing uplifting and noble about herding cows in Flaubert's
work, and vistas of fields with flowers do not bring Emma any
consolation. In fact, through Emma's cliche-ridden imagination,
Flaubert parodies the romantic notion of an idyllic escape to the
countryside when Emma fantasizes eloping with Rodolphe to `a
village of fishermen, where brown nets were drying in the wind, along a cliff with little huts. That is where they would settle down
to live: they would have a low house with a flat roof, in the shade
of a palm tree, at the end of a gulf, on the seaside'. This is both
particularly comic and also very sad, in that Emma, who lives in
the country, has internalized the fantasies of the city dweller she
aspires to be.

Since Emma is a reader of Flaubert's friend and fellow novelist
George Sand, it is difficult to resist comparing the character of
Emma to the heroine of Sand's earlier work Consuelo (1842),
a vast historical novel, set in the 18th century, that is almost
picaresque in its structure though not in its tone. Consuelo
follows the life of Consuelo from her impoverished childhood
in Venice to her eventual marriage to the half-mad Bohemian
(Czech) aristocrat Albert of Rudolstadt. Point by point, the two
novels are entirely opposite: Emma is trapped in a prosaic French
village, while Consuelo's life is almost a travelogue of the Austro
Hungarian empire; Emma yearns for the aristocratic life and
for the sophistication of the city and the theatre, while Consuelo
spends a good deal of time fleeing all of these things. The life
around Emma seems intensely boring but she tries to infuse it
with excitement, while Consuelo's life is fully Romantic in the
atmosphere and adventures that take place in medieval castles
with subterranean passageways and gloomy forests. But most of
all, the temperament of each heroine is directly opposed. Consuelo
is goodness itself, always patient, generous, resourceful, caring for
others, indifferent to wealth and prestige, and with no need for
exotic escape.

Urban exiles

Any where out of the world', was Charles Baudelaire's diagnosis
of human aspirations, so well represented by Emma Bovary
and so foreign to Consuelo. The expression, in English, was the
title of one of the prose poems in the volume Le Spleen de Paris
(1869). In Any where out of the world', he evokes the power of the eternal `elsewhere': `This life is a hospital where each patient is
obsessed with the desire to change beds'. This interest in what is
happening in the other parts of the world/hospital is a key to the
fascinating paradox that Flaubert, like Balzac, Sand, Stendhal,
and others, could entertain sophisticated readers with stories of
the supposedly stifling provincials, who, in turn, are shown to
spend their time longing for Paris (or longing for village life as if
they were Parisians). What could Parisians like Baudelaire find to
interest them in the life of an unhappy provincial housewife?

Baudelaire was one of the many admiring readers of Flaubert's
novel. In his review essay on Madame Bovary - which appeared
several months after the trial that acquitted Flaubert for outrage
to public and religious morality - Baudelaire described the novel
as the triumph of the power of writing, a power so great that it
scarcely needed a subject. Baudelaire either knew or intuited a
famous formulation that Flaubert used in a letter to his lover Louise
Colet five years earlier, saying that his dream was someday to write
`a book about nothing... that would have almost no subject or at
least where the subject would be almost invisible' (1852). Baudelaire
found in Madame Bovary the triumph of this artistic challenge: to
take the most banal subject, adultery, in the place where stupidity
and intolerance reign, la province, and to create a heroine who
faces this `total absence of genius' in a masculine way. This heroine,
Madame Bovary herself, `is very sublime in her kind, in her small
milieu and facing her small horizon. Baudelaire, in praising both
Flaubert's novel and its heroine, seems at times to identify with her,
despite the radical difference in places.

The quintessential Parisian poet, Baudelaire is almost
unimaginable elsewhere, but this is not to say that he sings
the praises of Paris. Having absorbed Hugo's teaching about
the grotesque and about human doubleness, Baudelaire was
fascinated by the ugly and by the sublime, by all that was
unpredictable and out of place. Perfectly Parisian, Baudelaire, as
both poet and as subject of his poetry, cultivated his sense of being in the wrong place as much as Emma Bovary did hers. He wrote
of Emma that in her convent school she made for herself a'God of
the future and of chance', and one of the great values of the capital
for Baudelaire was its capacity to produce random encounters that
generated lyrical fusions.