Gustave FLAUBERT (1821-1880). L.A., [Croisset] Saturday even - Lot 18

Gustave FLAUBERT (1821-1880). L.A., [Croisset] Saturday evening, midnight [May 8, 1852], to Louise Colet; 8pages in-8, envelope with postmarks. Beautiful letter to Louise Colet about Madame Bovary, Chateaubriand, and Dante. ... "This rectitude of heart of which you speak is only the same correctness of mind that I carry, I believe, into questions of art. As for me, I don't adopt all these distinctions of heart, mind, form, substance, soul or body. Everything is linked in man. - There was a time when you regarded me as a jealous egotist who delighted in the perpetual rumination of his own personality. That's what those who see the surface believe. - It's the same with that pride that so revolts others, yet is paid for by such great misery. - On the contrary, no one has sucked others in more than I have. I've sniffed out unknown scum. I have felt compassion for many things that sensitive people would never feel compassion for. - If La Bovary is worth anything, this book will not lack heart. Yet irony seems to dominate life. - That's why, when I was crying, I often looked in the mirror to see myself. - This disposition to hover over oneself is perhaps the source of all virtue. It removes you from your personality, far from keeping you there. Comedy taken to the extreme, comedy that doesn't make you laugh, the lyricism in the joke, is for me everything that makes me most envious as a writer. - The two human elements are there. Le Malade imaginaire goes further down into the inner worlds than any Agamemnon [...] It's a funny thing how well I sense comedy as a man, and how much my pen refuses it. - I converge on it more and more as I become less cheerful, for it is the ultimate sadness. - I've had theatrical ideas for some time, and the uncertain outline of a great metaphysical, fantastic and shouting novel that fell on my head two weeks ago. If I start writing it in five or six years' time, what will happen from the minute I write to the minute the ink dries on the last erasure? - The way I'm going, I won't have finished La Bovary in a year. I don't care about six months more or less. - But life is short! What sometimes crushes me is when I think of all the things I'd like to do before I croak, that I've already been working relentlessly and bitterly for 15 years, and that I'll never have the time to give myself the idea of what I wanted to do. He has read Dante's Inferno, which certainly has "great allure", but lacks plan and repeats itself too much: "An immense breath at times. - But I think Dante is like many beautiful things dedicated to St. Peter's in Rome [...], you don't dare say it bothers you. This work was made for a time, not for all times"... He has also read the Mémoires d'outre-tombe: "It exceeds his reputation. - Nobody was impartial to Chateaubriand. All parties held a grudge against him. - There would be a fine critique to be made of his works. - What a man he would have been without his poetics. How it shrank him. So many lies, so much pettiness. [...] Chateaubriand is like Voltaire. They did (artistically) everything they could to spoil the most admirable faculties that the good Lord had given them. - Without Racine, Voltaire would have been a great poet, and without Fénelon, what would the man who wrote Velléda & René have done? Napoleon was like them. Without Louis XIV, without the ghost of monarchy that obsessed him, we wouldn't have had the galvanism of a society that was already a corpse. - What makes the figures of antiquity so beautiful is that they were original. That's where it all comes from. Now how much study you have to go through to free yourself from books! and how much you have to read! You have to drink oceans & fish them out". Flaubert then recalled a tragedy he had written around 1847 with Louis Bouilhet, La Découverte de la vaccine; he had then studied Voltaire's theater extensively... "You have to read the bad and the sublime, not the mediocre. - I assure you that, as far as style is concerned, the people I dislike the most have perhaps served me better than the others". And he quotes several excerpts, calamitous indeed, from this tragedy in verse: "Here's poetry where I don't know anything about it, and still within the rules! He then recounts a young man's "lyrical love" for "la mère Hugo"... "Between two hearts that beat for each other, there are abysses. - Nothingness lies between them, all life and everything else. - No matter what the soul does, it doesn't break its solitude. - It walks with him. - You feel like an ant in a