excerpts from Flaubert's letters

Flaubert has a bad habit of quoting himself. Especially, in his early letters, he cited lines from the only novel that he had written-- November.

"Let us worry less about the results of our efforts. Let us love the muse and love her and love her."

"There were four women dancers and singers, almahs (the word almah means learned woman, blue-stocking; used however as we would use the word whore-- which goes to show, Monsieur, that women of letters in all countries--!)."

"I shall die at sixty before having formed any opinion concerning myself."

In a letter to Maxime du Camp, discussing the death of Alfred le Poittevin, who was the uncle of Guy de Maupassant . . . "On Wednesday I walked all the afternoon, with a dog that followed me without being called. It had become attached to Alfred and always went with him when he walked alone. The night before his death this same dog howled frightfully and could not be quieted. From time to time I rested on mossy banks, smoking and looking up at the sky, and behind a heap of brushwood I lay down and slept a little."

From a letter to Louise Colet, his lover . . . "You wish me to be frank? Very well then, I will be. One day, our day together in Mantes, under the trees, you told me that you 'would not exchange your happiness for the fame of Corneille.' Do you remember that? Is my memory correct? If you knew how those words shocked me, how they chilled the very marrow of my bones! Fame! Fame! What is fame? Nothing, a mere noise, the external accompaniment of the joy Art gives us. "The fame of Corneille" indeed! But-- to be Corneille! To feel one's self Corneille!"

From a letter to Louise Colet, quoting her back to herself: "Love is a great comedy, and so is life, when you are not playing one of the roles."

"I believe in nothing, not even myself, which is rare. I devote myself to Art because it gives me pleasure to do so, but I have no faith whatever in beauty, any more than in anything else."

"Everyone takes his enjoyment in his own way and for himself alone."

"To be stupid and selfish and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless."

"Happiness is a red cloak with a tattered lining; when you try to cover yourself with it, the wind blows it to pieces, and you find yourself floundering in the chilly rags of something you had thought would give you warmth."

"Yes, that man has missed something who has never awakened in an anonymous bed beside a face he will never see again, and who has never left a brothel at sunrise feeling like throwing himself into the river out of pure disgust for life."

To Louise Colet-- "You wrote something that is very true: 'Love is a great comedy, and so is life, when you are not playing one of the roles.' About a year and a half ago I experienced a living illustration of this, something I came upon by mere chance and preferred not to witness to the end. At that time I often visited a family in which there was a charming young girl, marvelously beautiful-- of a very Christian, almost Gothic, beauty, if I can put it that way. She had a candid mind, easily susceptible to emotion; one moment she would be crying, the next laughing, like sunshine after a shower. The feelings of this lovely pure creature were entirely at the mercy of my words. I can still see her lying against her pink cushion and looking at me, as I read, with her great blue eyes. One day we were alone, sitting on a sofa; she took my hand, twined her fingers in mine; this I let her do without thinking (most of the time I'm a great innocent), and she gave me a look which still makes me shudder. Just then her mother entered, took in everything, and smiled at what she thought was the acquisition of a son-in-law. I shall not forget that smile-- the sublimest thing I have ever seen. It was a compound of indulgent benevolence and genteel vulgarity. I am sure that the poor girl had been carried away by an irresistible affectionate impulse, one of those moments of mawkish sentimentality when everything within you seems to be melting and dissolving-- a voluptuous agony that would fill you with delight if only it didn't bring you to the verge of sobs or tears. You cannot conceive the terror I felt. I returned home shattered, repoaching myself for being alive. I don't know whether I exaggerated the situation, but even though I did not love her I should gladly have given my life to redeem that look of hopeless love to which I had not responded. . . . What a horrible invention the bourgeois is, don't you agree? Why is he in the world? And what is he doing there, poor wretch?"

To L Colet-- "Try to put some of your intelligence into your relations with me. Later your heart will thank your mind for this."

To L Colet-- "You claim that I treat you like 'the lowest kind of woman.' I don't know what 'the lowest kind of woman' is, or the highest kind, or the next highest. Women are relatively inferior or superior by reason of their beauty and the attraction that they exert on us, that's all."

"The man who retains the same self-esteem when he travels that he had as he looked at himself every day in the mirror in his room at home is either a very great man or a very sturdy fool."

"Tomorrow I shall be thirty-one. I have just passed that fatal thirtieth year, the year that ranks a man. It is the age when a man takes his future shape, settles down, marries, chooses a trade. There are few people who do not become bourgeois at thirty."

"How many young men I have known who had a pious horror of "houses" and yet picked up the most beautiful cases of clap you can imagine from their so-called mistresses."

"It is perhaps a perverse taste, but I like prostitution-- and for its own sake, quite apart from what lies underneath."

"Yes, I maintain (and in my opinion this should be a rule of conduct for an artist) that one's existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod. Physical and intellectual gratifications have nothing in common. If they happen to coincide, hold fast to them. But do not try to combine them: that would be factitious. And this idea of "happiness" incidentally, is the almost exclusive cause of all human misfortunes. We must store up our hearts' marrow and give of it only in small doses."

"Nothing is left except the vulgar and stupid mob. All of us are equally mired in mediocrity. Social equality has spread to the mind. Our books, our Art, our science, are designed for everybody, like railroads and public shelters. Mankind is frenziedly seeking moral abasement, and I resent being a part of it."

"A week ago I was enraptured by a camp of gypsies that stopped at Rouen. This is the third time I have seen them, each time with pleasure. The marvelous thing is that they aroused the hatred of the bourgeois, even though they were harmless as lambs. I earned the dissaproval of the crowd by giving them a few sous, and I heard some delightfully Philistine remarks. This hatred stems from a deep and complex source; it's to be found in all champions of order. It's the hatred felt for the bedouin, the heretic, the philosopher, the recluse, the poet; and it contains an element of fear."