Sentimental Education was a misunderstood classic
AHEADBOARD IN A ROOM at the Hôtel Littéraire Gustave Flaubert in Rouen – the city where its namesake was born – boasts a curiously dispiriting quotation:He travelled.
He came to know the melancholy of steamboats, cold mornings awakening in tents, the dizzying sameness of landscapes and ruins, the bitterness of interrupted friendships.
He returned.
He went back to society, and he had other loves. But the persistent memory of the first one rendered them all insipid; moreover, that vehement desire that is the very flower of sensation had dissipated. Years passed; he went on living with an idle mind and an inert heart.
The passage, in French at the hotel, but quoted here in Raymond N. MacKenzie’s new translation, is from Flaubert’s Sentimental Education. The novel, which up until this point has tracked the life of a young bourgeois named Frédéric Moreau, suddenly skips over his middle years to see his ambitions thwarted by mediocrity and age. This shift in narration is powerful: by omitting those intervening years Flaubert has Moreau’s disillusionment cut more deeply. Marcel Proust called it the “most beautiful” thing about the book, though for a hotel room it is questionable – a joke, perhaps, on tourists who might not read French. The book itself is scarcely more jovial, although it certainly can be funny.
Published in 1869, Sentimental Education portrays the coming of age of its central character in the years before France’s Second Empire, an ironic hero whose self-absorption prevents him from any meaningful engagement in life. His involvement in the Revolution of 1848, which led to the first modern democratic election with universal male suffrage, dwindles in comparison to his failed attempts to seduce Madame Arnoux, the object of his affection. His friends fare no better. Flaubert meant the book to be a “moral history” of how the inner lives of his generation were shaped and disillusioned by contemporary events. “The only amusing thing about 1848”, wrote Charles Baudelaire, who unlike Flaubert participated in the revolt, “was that everyone was constructing utopias like castles in the air.”
The novel sold poorly and its publisher lost money. Two years later, neglected by readers and misunderstood by critics, its author declared to his friend Maxime du Camp as they surveyed the wreckage of Paris after the bloody suppression of the 1871 Commune that if Sentimental Education had been properly understood, the destruction around them could have been averted.
