Gustave FLAUBERT. L.A.S. "ton G.", [Croisset] Monday evening - Lot 88

Gustave FLAUBERT. L.A.S. "ton G.", [Croisset] Monday evening [January 2, 1854] 1 a.m., to Louise Colet; 4pages in-4. Beautiful, long letter about Madame Bovary, Victor Hugo, with a vigorous diatribe against the people and the bourgeois. He hopes she has received "the voluminous package from the Crocodile" [Victor Hugo's nickname], and believes the manuscript of Louise's Handmaid has arrived in Rouen: "It is rather difficult to get there now because of the snow that fills the roads, and as the Seine is frozen and the boats cannot sail, we are a bit like Robinsons". He will read his poem "carefully, first en masse, to see the whole, then in detail, then en masse and I'll give you long comments, as explained as possible. I will put into it, poor dear Muse, all my heart and all my mind, have no fear". He worked with Louis Bouilhet on Madame Bovary: "He was pleased with my kiss [of Emma and Rodolphe]. But, before the said passage, I have a transitional one which contains 8 lines - which took me 3 days, - where there isn't a word too many-, & which I still have to redo! again! because it's too slow. -It's a direct dialogue that needs to be turned indirect, and where I don't have the necessary space to say what needs to be said, it all needs to be a quick & distant plan! so much so that it needs to be lost & hardly visible in the book! -After which I have three or four other corrections, infinitesimally small, but which will take me the whole other week! What slowness! What slowness! Anyway, I'm making progress. I've taken a big step forward& I feel an inner lightening that makes me all gleeful, even though tonight I literally sweated with pain. It's so hard to undo what's done and well done, to stuff something new in its place without anyone seeing the embedding". As for Bouilhet's Fossils, "I find it very beautiful, and continue to maintain that it had to be done that way. Everyone, after the Fossils, would have made a great lyrical tartine about man; but man has changed, & to take him completely you have to follow his history, the gentleman in the black suit being as natural as the tattooed savage, so you have to present the two states & everything intermediate between them. I think this method was the strongest, & the most difficult above all"... Then he talks about Victor Hugo's Châtiments, and the poem Les Abeilles [The Imperial Coat]: "It's stiff, especially the idea& I find Montfaucon's flies splendid. As for L'Expiation, what a pity it's sloppy! The whole Vaterloo is stupid, but the Retreat from Russia and St. Helena (apart from the numerous blemishes) pleased me immensely. It could have been made into something as beautiful as Le Feu du Ciel [a poem from Les Orientales]. -Anyway, this man is a great man and a very great man". Among his various readings, "je me gaudys avec Pétrus Borel qui est Henaurme. I find there my old phrenesies of youth! It was better than the current currency. The tone had been raised to such an extent that we sometimes came across a good word, a good expression. - In any case, there's a lesson to be learned from this unfortunate book: how socialism was already breaking through! How the preoccupation with morality renders any work of imagination false & annoying! etc.! I turn a lot to criticism. The novel I'm writing sharpens this faculty. - For it is above all a work of criticism, or rather of anatomy. The reader won't notice (I hope) all the psychological work hidden beneath the Form. But he will feel the effect. -On the other hand, I'm trained to write big, sumptuous things, battles, sieges, descriptions of the fabulous old Orient. On Thursday evening, I spent two beautiful hours with my head in my hands, thinking about the colorful precincts of Ecbatane. -Nothing has been written about all this! How many things are still floating in the limbo of human thought! - There's no shortage of subjects, but there is a shortage of men. He then recounts "two kind anecdotes". One concerns "a man who drowned with his two children tied to his waist. Misery here is atrocious, bands of poor people are starting to roam the countryside at night"; a gendarme has been killed: "The good peasants are starting to tremble in their skins. If they're shaken a little, it won't make me cry. This caste deserves no pity; all vices & ferocities fill it". The second story concerns the execution of a murderer: "to see this eccentric guillotined, more than ten thousand people from the countryside arrived in Provins the day before. [...] O universal suffrage! O sophists! O charlatan!