BOOKS AND WRITERS
SSZ TOU have buried your novel under a heap of details which are all well done but utterly superfluous ; they hide the
essentials and must be removed—an easy task." Thus Sias line Du Camp in a letter to Flaubert, in July, 1856, when the publication of Madame Bovary as a serial in the Revue de Paris was discussed. He adds a request for permission to have the cuts " done under our supervision by someone who is experienced and clever— and you will have published something really good instead of some- thing imperfect and padded." Madame Bovary " padded " ! " Gigantesque ! " was the word Flaubert scrawled across the back of the letter. He never answered it, and in the end the Revue agreed to publish the novel as it then stood. But a few weeks earlier Flaubert had written to Louis Bouilhet: "The corrections we made in Bovary finished me, and I confess that I now almost regret having made them—but as you see, Signor Du Camp finds that I haven't made enough. Will everyone think the same perhaps ? Or will some agree with me that there are too many ? " Today, one hundred years almost to the day since Flaubert drafted the first of the scenarios for Madame Bovary, it is safe to say that everyone emphatically does not think like Signor Du Camp. But the last question in Flaubert's letter to Bouilhet remained to be answered. Had he really whittled away too much, against his own instinct 7 Was this still the Madame Bovary of his early conception ? The question remained without an answer for a century. Now Professor Pommier has provided it, in a highly original manner.* His First Madame Bovary is, of course, synthetic. Flaubert never wrote more than one complete version of this novel. Unlike the Education Sentimentale and the Tentation, the first, immensely prolix versions of which were written before Madame Bovary, Flaubert revised, condensed, cut and rewrote the story of Emma as he went along and rarely tackled a new chapter before the preceding one was truly finished. But he had a mania for preserving discarded material and painstakingly kept every bit of writing that had, at one time or another during• these five years, gone into'the making of Madame Bovary and come out again. The total of this " waste " amounts to over 1,800 foolscap sheets, used on both sides. With the help of Mlle. Leleu, Professor Pommier has salvaged it from the Rouen Municipal Library, and together they have now recon- stituted Madame Bovary—as she might have been.
For all its artificiality, this is a fascinating and revealing experiment in what might be called " creative scholarship." An entirely new book has emerged, and with it an entirely new and rather bewildering Emma Bovary. By carefully replacing and interpolating into the linal version all deletions made by Flaubert, and by expanding his condensations back to their original length—there were up to bsclve different versions from which to select and combine, and in some cases no more than a word or two, in others entire paragraphs and whole pages had to be restored—Professor Pommier has pro- duced a novel which is twice as long as the final version published in 1857. The mere visual impression of these pages is overwhelming. All additions to the final text have been set in italics, and this
l!oographical jig-saw puzzle enables one to read t two versions simultaneously. The result of this immensely skille labour is that the first Madame Bovary completely crushes the second, and the first Emma, with her overflowing and as yet unsubdued vitality, her " exuberance and spontaneity as well as her occasional heaviness and clumsiness," as Professor Pommier calls it in his preface, educes the second to, a beautifully frustrated statue.
.1-his is not saying too much. There is more here of everything, e! landscape, background, incident, characterisation. But although the descriptive passages seem to have suffered a little less from the author's knife than the dialogue which has been slashed merci- lessly. one notes at once that the fundamental proportions of the novel have not been altered ; the Pommier version possesses the same perfect balance and equilibrium as the final text. But the Madame-Bovary. By Gustave Flaubert. Nouvelle Version. A text established from the manuscripts in the Rouen Library, by Professor lean Pommier of the College de France and Mlle. Gabrielle Leleu. (Editions Jose Corti, Paris. 1,500 Francs.) whole seems to gain in depth. The villagers especially cease to be laconic symbols and emerge in the round. Homais, it is true, rather bursts the dams with his learned verbosity, but what a monument of provincial conceit he has become ! There is, of course, a great deal more of Charles, and the unhappy, mediocre medical officer is much the better for it. I had always felt that Bovary could not be quite as dumb as all this, that more must be going on in his breast than Flaubert permits to be divined. And, indeed, right through the book the man struggles desperately for his self-expres- sion. Compare the scene of his parting from the dead Emma in Pommier's version with the final text. This is not the Charles Bovary we used to know.
However, it is Emma who, in this early version, sweeps all before her. Her statuesque rigidity has gone ; the familiar features, so impeccably drawn, of the petite bourgeoise of the French provinces, suddenly change ; they become sphinx-like, alarming, full of many simultaneous and often contradictory meanings. If the first Emma Bovary is 'a great deal less restrained than her final image, if she allows herself to be carried away into realms of desire and passion unknown to her classical sister, it is not only because she is literally a much more full-bosomed and full-blooded woman bursting with life and erotic energy, but also because hers is, it must be admitted, a much more finely spun sensitivity and a more complex sophistica- tion. Why did Flaubert cut out this passage from her lonely wanderings through the streets of Rouen after the ball with Leon, which seems to be taken straight from Proust ?
"Ce n'etait pas la premiere fois qu'elle se trotivait errant ainsi le matin, la tete route pleine de tapage, de couleurs et de tristesse. Mais it lui emit impossible de se rappeler le lieu, la cause, ni l'epoque. En cherchant ainsi dans ses sensations perdues, elle rencontra de nouveau le bat qu'elle venait de quitter tout a l'heure. 1l lui parut etre fort en arriere dans sa vie passee, et déjà si loin qu'elle regrettait de ne plus y etre." (Pommier).
This is a new woman. The Emma Bovary we know would have been incapable of such a reflection. Here zones of the subconscious are opened up to which she possessed no key, whose existence were unknown to her. Why did Flaubert close all these doors again, pretending they were not there or there was nothing much behind them ? For the Pommier version shows that tie battled through- out the entire book to keep Emma locked up in the frame he was constructing for her. Emma's boundless vitality bursts it again and again. The " battle of the style," this implacable warfare against the exuberant prolixity of both the narrative and the character of its heroine, grows in intensity and reaches its climax at the end when one of the•novel's most gripping passages, Charles Bovary's last, and almost only, conversation with his little daughter is sacrificed.
In chapter after chapter, as we now see, the course had to be reset ; the pattern kept getting out of control and had to be redrawn under iron compulsion. Emma Bovary refuses to conform until the very end, and until the very end Flaubert is unable to resist her. This is not the place to attempt a new assessment of the " real Flaubert " which these salvaged manuscripts demand. No doubt the question " what was really the matter with Flaubert " will be reopened, and the riddle probed once more with the help of this new evidence. " I am convinced the passages I am cutting out are the best in the book," Flaubert wrote to Bouilhet when he was still at work on Madame Bovary. " The final effect can only be attained through negation of exuberance. But it is just this exuberance which delights me."
Professor Pommier nevertheless maintains that " the true Madame Bovary is the book which Flaubert published." The cuts which Maxime Du Camp made later in the serial version of Madame Bovary certainly ruined the book. In all probability the Pommier version would have equally horrified Flaubert. But all the same it divests the final version of its air of finality. It stands in its own right. One shares Flaubert's regrets, and delights in the richness, generosity and candour of the writer he did not permit himself
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