French Places - the literature, art, culture and history of France - Chateaubriand, Flaubert, Balzac and Stendhal

 

 

 

 

Romantic writers

 

Being of an age when one listens less to the mind than the heart, mine naturally skipped a beat when, finis les philosophes, we were told to turn to the chapter entitled Le Romantisme.  Since I saw myself as being intensely romantique, I was disappointed to discover that what the French meant by the term was not only “dreamy, passionate, flamboyant” but, rather, a whole school of thought and literature which was often quite level-headed.

In English we would have prosaically called the period “The 19th Century”, but the French preferred the poetic epithet.  Euphemism notwithstanding, when they read the word “romanticism” they automatically understand it as “19th century”, or at least the first three quarters thereof.

The painting on the opening page of a towering castle with slender turrets wreathed in mist, on a lonely promontory, was romantic enough by my way of thinking, and so was another illustration showing a portrait of Chateaubriand.  He was described as the very first romantic writer, and looked to me like a real brother, with his hair wildly blowing in the wind and slouching languorously against a crumbling rampart.   

But the gloomy look in his eyes, I learned to my dismay, was probably because he was yearning for the return of his aristocratic privileges lost in the Revolution, and dreading the upstart vulgarity of the Empire which followed it.  A rebel of sorts, but not the sort I fancied myself to be!

Chateaubriand, as the founding father of the Romantic Movement, celebrated nature and the emotions, although his great work was a contentious memoir in which he got even with a lot of his enemies.  He gave it the deceptively romantic title Confessions from Beyond the Grave, not to suggest that it was his ghost who was recalling life on earth, but because he didn’t want it to be published while he remained alive.  But due to financial difficulties he gave in to popular demand and did so anyway, whether it gave offense or not.

Although he was a forerunner aesthetically, he was a retrograde throwback too, by the standards of the period in which as a blue-blood he was forced to live.  Significantly, his noble name was best remembered for the tender cut of beef his cook discovered when the great man was appointed, by a briefly restored King, to be Ambassador to England.  He must have been at pains to make his master’s stay in that culinary wasteland as pleasant as possible.

(An earlier Frenchman invented something much more popular, mayonnaise, in similar circumstances.  When the Duc de Richelieu was laying siege to a fortress on the island of Menorca, not much could be found to eat – Menorca being  English  then - so his cook took what was at hand, eggs and oil, and beat them together to make a frothy sauce.  It was named sauce mahonnaise after the capital of the island, Mahón.  When it became the rage of Versailles it was further frenchified to mayonnaise.)

 

 

 

 

René de Chateaubriand

 

 

 

But the wave of real 19th century romantics were, as one of them put it, the children left behind by Napoleon’s defeated soldiers.  While the dragoons with their big hats and moustaches were being slaughtered at Waterloo, in this poet’s sombre words, their anxious wives brought into the world a generation which was “pale, ardent and nervous”.

These souls grew rather crookedly up in the ruins of both Revolution and Empire, one heaped over the other.  The first crop of misfits were the romantics, followed by the symbolists and last of all the modernists, although I could never tell them clearly apart. France produced so many of these flamboyant literati that they spilled over into the next century and right up to the First World War, when poetry became drabber and smaller-minded, not to say ingrown and obscure.

The one who in my opinion least deserved the name “romantic” was strangely the most popular, Victor Hugo. I disliked his bombastic style, even if he did save the Cathedral from destruction by writing The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

His style was informative and journalistic, even didactical in a self-righteous way which annoyed me.  But I supposed that that was part of being the family writer par excellence.  I thought that anyone who was reputed to dash off 500 lines before breakfast could only be a pompous fake. I needed poems, whether in verse or prose, that were painfully extracted from experience like teeth, not churned out of an inexhaustible word factory.

 

 

 

 

Victor Hugo

 

 

 

Flaubert, described to us as the father of the modern psychological novel, was aimed at a more erudite audience, but I found his style over-wrought and over-stuffed with details, even if they were exquisitely described. A writer had to be able to say some things between the lines, to know when to leave the reader hanging in the air and divining the rest, rather than pave every crook and cranny with laboriously chosen metaphors and insights. I skimmed through Madame Bovary but was unable to sympathize with her plight – to the contrary, I felt relief when she finally put herself out of her misery.

Many years later, I read the journals of an early 20th century writer, Paul Léautaud, who like me detested Flaubert and, in general, the posturing and pretentiousness which had since Flaubert irrevocably blighted French writing.  This overweening complicatedness took such root that, literary fashions being what they are, it became almost impossible for a writer to express himself simply, clearly and enjoyably, .

Flaubert, Léautaud said, was the first to impose himself as an author-god who could only be understood by a chosen elite of reader-gods.  By appealing to the snobbery which was the ugly flipside of his countrymen’s natural fraternity, he succeeded in having thumping bores such as Bovary acclaimed as prestigious masterpieces. 

 

 

 

Such writers are what Léautaud called makers of clever sentences, “phraseurs”. They feel compelled, when describing how they go down the road to buy a pound of potatoes, to transform the simple event into a subtle work of art, full of innuendo and allusion.  It would be beneath them to write, “I went down the road to buy some potatoes”.

The literary self-consciousness with which all we modern scribblers are to one degree or another cursed, that is the fear of falling below a certain aesthetic standard, of not seeming masterful enough, got started with Flaubert.  Our text book said that at the end of each day’s work, he would retire to what he called “le gueuloir”, the shouting room, where he read aloud everything he had written at the top of his lungs to see if it made the proper effect on his ear-drums.

The reader is so impressed, or cowed, by this display of intelligence that, even if he doesn’t understand what it’s all about, he feels awe for the author and even for the potatoes, which by association acquire a greatness of their own.  And even if he hates what he has read, he doesn’t say so because he fears being branded as an ignoramus. This is the formula which Flaubert created, to enable his disciples to bully, or bluff their way to success.

I thought of him as “flatulent Flaubert”, because reading his books was like having to sit next to someone who doesn’t stop farting, and being expected to enjoy the smell as if it were the rarest perfume.

 

 

 

 

 

Gustave Flaubert

 

  

Stendhal by comparison was airy rather than claustrophobic, and consequently easier to read.  His “voice”, as creative writing courses put it, was light and charming, like a good after-dinner conversation, for he was in his youth a man-about-town and dandy. He hated the flowery style of the day which Chateaubriand had consecrated, with flights of lyricism and enthusiastic declarations of virtue and nobility.  To purge himself of any temptation to fall into the same trap, he would read, before sitting down to work, several pages of the penal code, to get the right realistic tone.

But there was something of the sophisticated dilettante about Stendhal which seemed small to me, hungry for tragic grandeur as I was.  His stories were touching and full of deft observation, irony and wit, which made them attractive to the readers of the 20th century, given that his writing was largely ignored in the previous one. 

But for my taste he didn’t dig deep enough, he was less philosophical than psychological, and less romantic than, well, plainly libidinous.  All Don Juans end up as memorialists, it has been said, and you could feel the ageing rake vicariously enjoying his handsome young heroes’ conquests, always of virtuous and love-starved Christian ladies whose defences melt like ice in the meridional sun.

But, compared with his contemporaries, he was a master of the natural or “spoken style” which is so difficult to pull off without sounding vulgar, especially in a Latin language.  His sentences seemed to write themselves, loose but elegant, as if the reader had a hand in where they went.  That was, in my opinion, much better than Hugo and Flaubert with their relentlessly resounding volleys of beautiful French.

 I also liked the way he subtly took the reader into his confidence, like a friend who shares your own fears and desires, because it tore down the wall between lofty author and humble reader, which was less intimidating, even if later on I found it a bit cheap.  His novels used a love story, always a tragic one, to give life to a portrait of his time.  Without the seduction scenes, Le Rouge et le Noir would seem like a  political pamphlet defending the rank-and-file “liberals” like Stendhal, who longed for another popular leader like Napoleon, and attacking the blue-blooded “ultras”, the monarchists who wanted to drive out democratic reforms and rule by divine right once more.

What I found tiresome was that Stendhal made it sound as if the misery of the world was caused by the fact that a small number of men in which he and his ilk were not included had all the wealth and privileges.  It followed from this that their frustrated wives were suicidally driven to deceive them with down-trodden aesthetes like himself.

But the worst misfortune a man, or even a woman, could suffer in a Stendhal novel was having to live in a priggish provincial town, such as his native Grenoble, rather than Paris.  He had been a glorious officer in Napoleon’s army and would impress the ladies in the salons of the capital with tales of the Russian campaign, where he personally killed twenty enemy soldiers. Then, as I saw him in a rare sketch, he was still a high-spirited dandy with a puffed-up hairdo.

By the time he wrote his two great novels, he had changed become the pudgy, weary-looking consular official of the famous portrait shown in our text book. Stendhal’s work wasn’t really appreciated until our time, for its psychological finesse, but no one seems to have turned the same clear light on him.   

His pen name was just one of many pseudonyms he used, eschewing his real name, Marie-Henri Beyle.  In this he was like the equally vain Voltaire, who was born François-Marie Arouet.  How those two church-haters must have hated bearing the name of the very symbol of mindless Catholicism, the saint who never said a recorded word.  As for their surnames, neither resounded with any of the glamour with which they always strove to surround themselves, so they took new ones, just like today’s film stars.      

Speaking of films, Lilo and I had seen at a Latin Quarter cinema the one made some years previously of Le Rouge et le Noir, starring the beautiful actors Gérard Philippe and Daniele Darrieux, both the epitome of elegance.  How the rotund, bewigged little Stendhal, or Marie-Henri, would have loved to resemble the reborn Julien Sorel, whose romantic face will forever float over the pages of his book, even if it was so unlike that of a clumsy small-town boy!

  Stendhal wasn’t lucky with women, and in spite of his brilliant conversation and glorious exploits he knew all too well what it was to be scorned or simply shown the door.  He would hopefully say, “To make a woman laugh is to have one leg in her bed”, to which one might pessimistically add, “The problem is the other leg”.

 

 

 

 

 

Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle)

 

 

 

But, as soon as I began reading Le Père Goriot, I realized that Balzac towered above all of them. He had the gift of writing intelligently in a way which all readers could understand, without ever being superficial or trite, and that is what made him so popular.  His characters weren’t simplified caricatures like Hugo’s, complicated neurotics like Flaubert’s, or two-dimensional vehicles for ideas like Stendhal’s. They had not been created just to illustrate the social and sexual injustices of the time, but the dilemma of life itself, what he called “la comédie humaine”.

Balzac treated his subjects less like a lofty man of letters than a toreador who puts them to death while he lovingly caresses them between the horns.  Even proud Flaubert strove to emulate him, while taking care not to openly imitate his style, but he simply lacked Balzac’s balls, his brute force. 

Caricatures of the time showed Balzac as a great puppeteer glaring down on his marionettes as they twitched on their strings.  Having worked for a legal firm in his youth, he had seen people in the raw, heirs scrapping over bodies not yet cold, cruel fathers disowning their children. If he had any illusions before, he lost them then.

He didn’t share the revolutionary ideals of his colleagues so he simply painted society as it was, prostrated before the values of savage profiteering and insatiable vanity.  He made money the subject of his novels because knew it was the only thing people believed in, above kings and republics and empires, and even gods.   

Like his characters, he was hungry for glory, prestige and money, so he wrote a lot, and a lot of rubbish too, to keep his printers supplied with the latest episode, and his creditors off the doorstep. The fear of the debtors’ prison haunted him just as it did so many of his characters, even as they danced in elegant ballrooms and flung their last francs on the roulette table.

   Balzac’s stroke of genius in my favourite novel, Le Père Goriot, was placing the drama not in the glittering drawing rooms to which all the characters aspired, but a squalid boarding house where a handful of them were forced to live, awaiting better times. The Pension-Vauquer was a sort of Purgatory, and the homes of the rich only came into view when the desperate boarders emerged to beg their luckier relatives to help them enter the world of privilege.

It is a parable set half in heaven and half in hell, except that the angels are just as selfish and cynical as the devils.  At times I almost envied the threadbare guests of the boarding house, getting tipsy and cracking jokes when an extra ration of wine has been served.  I didn’t pity the respectably-married aristocrats with their appearances to keep up and lovers to keep in luxury, but I didn’t envy them either.

I felt just like Eugène de Rastignac, the book’s romantic hero, a well-born but penniless student who came to Paris to make a place for himself in the world.  At the end of the novel, after seeing what an abject and vicious world he has taken on, he feels a pang of nostalgia for the simple life full of certitudes he has left behind in the country, among his loved ones.

Then he takes courage and, standing defiantly on a dusky ridge, looks down at the lights coming on in the great city and cries out, “Now, it’s between you and me!”.  Ever since reading those words, every time I strode over the Pont Neuf, I would gaze at the jagged skyline across the water and murmur my own improved version of them, “Paris, à nous deux!”.

 

 

 

 

 

Honoré de Balzac

 

xxx