Flaubert's Parrot

The chapter attempts to portray events from the perspective of Louise Colet. She tells the reader to “take my arm” as she has “tales to tell” (128). Remembering how she met Flaubert, she reminds the reader that she was famous and married at the time. “I was the candle,” she claims, and Flaubert “was the moth” (128). She considered Flaubert a provincial person, happy to be accepted in artistic circles for the first time; she had been in a similar position.

While she was 35 to Flaubert’s 24, Louise is unapologetic about the difference in age. Their time together was passionate, though she believes that he may have been a little “nervous in the face of my beauty” (131). Their relationship was different to anything Flaubert had experienced before, whether with prostitutes, grisettes, or his male friends. It was more complicated.

After less than 12 months together, Louise becomes annoyed when Flaubert chooses to travel around Brittany for an extended period. He misses her and writes often. He also sends her flowers, each of which she remembers. She then recounts an incident whereby Flaubert refused to meet her at his home. He then tells her to marry Victor Cousin. In response, Louise flees to England.

She stays in a “fine round tower covered in ivy” (134) and meets with famous people from around Europe. She picks a flower for Flaubert and remarks on his ignorance of the symbolism of flowers, which is a language unto itself. Louise believes that Flaubert never understood women, though admits to feeling jealous occasionally. She compares herself to the women from Flaubert’s diaries.

Flaubert frequently tried to humiliate Louise. He forbade her from visiting his home or meeting his mother or writing to him directly. He lied and “spoke ill” (136) of Louise to his friends. He ridiculed her work. Louise believes that Flaubert humiliated her because the qualities he initially found so charming in her began to irritate him. Perhaps, she reasons, he feared her, terrified that he might “love me completely” (137). Perhaps it “flattered his vanity” (138) to constantly desire Louise and then deny himself the pleasure of being with her.

They send one another literature samples. Flaubert chastises Louise for making the wrong comments on his writing. He calls her poetry “soft, slack and banal” (140). She does not believe that Flaubert cared at all for poetry and decided that all writing should echo his personal style. He also felt that everyone should live in the same manner as he did. Flaubert considered himself a wild animal—a polar bear or a buffalo on the prairie—but Louise suggests he “was really just a parrot” (142). She then lists his hypocrisies, including that he nearly went broke buying gloves. Louise knows that “people will take Gustave’s side” (142) after they are dead. She does not mind, admitting that “I am resigned” (142).

This chapter presents an alphabetized list of commonly known facts about the life and work of Flaubert, with a short discussion on each entry. It is modeled after Flaubert’s own dictionary.

Selected entries include:

• Louise Colet: a “tedious, importunate, promiscuous woman […] who tried to trap Gustave into marriage” (144)—and, simultaneously, a “brave, passionate, deeply misunderstood woman […] who committed the sin of wanting to make someone else happy” (144).
• Maxine Du Camp: one who “wrote with steel nibs whereas Gustave always used a quill pen” (144); Flaubert’s social alter ego.
• Epilepsy: a strategy allowing Flaubert to “sidestep a conventional career” (145).
• Irony: “either the devil’s mark or the snorkel of sanity” (145).
• Jean-Paul Sartre: a “highbrow Louise Colet” (146).
• Mme. Flaubert: the writer’s mother, as well as his “gaoler, confidante, nurse, patient, banker and critic” (146).
• Prussians: “vandals in white gloves, clock-thieves who know Sanskrit” (146).
• George Sand: “Gustave’s second mother” (147).
• Whores: “necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis” (148).