From
an early age, Flaubert preferred the beautiful vistas he discovered in books;
and yet he could never avoid the most awful truths of human existence: disease, disintegration, illness
and death. He felt both a cynical distrust of bourgeois fantasies—that
individuals could, through education and hard work, rise above the animal
limitations of their bodies—and a deep abiding sympathy for those human beings
foolish enough to believe them.
His
parents wanted Flaubert to pursue everything about bourgeois professional life
that he despised; and it is perhaps only because of several illnesses and
tragedies that Flaubert escaped the fate they mapped out for him. In the midst
of his miserable adventures as a law student in Paris (“What a marvelous idea it was of
somebody’s to invent the Law School for the express purpose of boring the shit
out of us!”), he began suffering a series of epileptic seizures that sent him
home for weeks at a time; he was afflicted with huge painful boils on his neck
and body, bad teeth, gout, and very probably syphilis; then, over a miserable
couple of years, those closest to him began dying—first his father, then his
beloved sister, and finally the dearest friend of his youth, Alfred Le
Poittevin. Without these misfortunes and ailments, he might never have
cultivated his solitary nature. As he wrote Le Poittevin in May 1845, “The only
way not to be unhappy is to shut yourself up in Art and count all the rest as
nothing.”
I have said an irrevocable farewell
to the practical life. My nervous illness was the transition between two
states. From now until a day that is far distant I ask for no more than five or
six quiet hours in my room, a good fire in winter, and a pair of candles to
light me at night.
By shutting himself up with “Art”
(a word he always capitalized), he could just as firmly shut his door on the
world. “I hate life,” he wrote to another youthful friend, Maxime Du Camp.
“There: I have said it; I’ll not
take it back. Yes, life; and everything that reminds me that life must be
borne. It bores me to eat, to dress, to
stand on my feet, etc. I have dragged this hatred everywhere, wherever I have
been: at school, in Rouen, in Paris, on the Nile.” The world’s temptations
stopped being so tempting as Flaubert grew older. Partly it was his faulty body
falling apart. But in reading his letters, it is clear that much of the passion
was simply knocked clean out of him.