Three Stories

Overview

Three Tales is a hundred and ten pages, published in 1877, three years before Flaubert died, and it was the last book he completed. He had spent the previous decade on projects that exhausted him, and these were written relatively quickly, partly to prove he still could.

The design is deliberate. Three stories, three periods: nineteenth-century Normandy, the Middle Ages, and Judea under Herod Antipas. Three styles to match: plain domestic realism, the flat bright manner of a saint’s legend, and a dense, archaeological orientalism thick with proper names. Flaubert’s argument throughout his career was that the author should be like God in creation, present everywhere and visible nowhere, and the book is a demonstration that the principle can be applied to any material.

They are usually read for the first story. A Simple Heart is one of the half-dozen short stories that other writers keep pointing to, and it has a particular history: George Sand, who corresponded with Flaubert for years and who thought his work heartless, told him he should write something with feeling in it. She died before it was finished. He said he had begun it entirely for her.

What happens

A Simple Heart. Félicité is a servant in Pont-l’Évêque, and the story covers fifty years of her life in forty pages, at a pace that accelerates and then slows.

She is a farm girl, jilted at a dance by a man who marries a rich widow to avoid conscription, and takes a place with Madame Aubain, a widow with two children and reduced means. She works for her for half a century. She is strong, silent, thrifty, and her employer does not much notice her.

Her attachments are removed one by one, and Flaubert times the removals with terrible precision. She loves Madame’s daughter Virginie and the child dies at boarding school of pneumonia; Félicité sits with the body for two nights and is asked to leave. She loves her nephew Victor, a sailor, and he dies of yellow fever in Havana; she has to have the word Havana explained to her and goes to look at a map. She nurses an old man covered in tumours. She goes deaf.

Then she is given a parrot, Loulou, brought back from the Americas, and she loves it entirely. It learns three phrases. It escapes once and is found. It dies. She has it stuffed, and it stands in her room among a rubbish of devotional prints and rosaries, and because deafness has left her with only its voice in her memory, and because the Holy Ghost is painted in the church as a bird, the two begin to overlap in her mind.

She grows old, develops pneumonia, and dies during the Corpus Christi procession, which pauses at the door below her window. The parrot, now moth-eaten and losing its stuffing, has been placed on the outdoor altar among the flowers. In the last sentence she believes she sees, in the opening heavens, an enormous parrot hovering over her head.

The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller. Told in the manner of a medieval life. Julian is born to a castle, is told by two separate prophecies that he will be a saint and that he will shed the blood of his parents, and develops as a boy an appetite for killing animals that Flaubert describes at length and without comment: mice in the chapel, then birds, then a massacre of deer in a valley, after which a stag he has shot tells him he will murder his father and mother.

He flees, becomes a mercenary and then an emperor’s son-in-law, and stops hunting. Years later his parents, wandering in search of him, arrive at his castle and are put to bed by his wife in his own room. He returns at night, finds two people in his bed, assumes adultery, and kills them both.

He becomes a beggar, then a ferryman on a dangerous river. One winter night a leper calls to be carried across, demands food, then his bed, then that Julian lie against him and warm him body to body. He does, and the leper becomes Christ and carries him to heaven. Flaubert ends the story by saying that this is roughly how it is shown on a stained-glass window in a church in his part of the country.

Herodias. The most difficult and the least read. The tetrarch Herod Antipas is under pressure from the Romans, from the Arabs whose princess he discarded, and from his wife Herodias, who wants the prophet in his cistern dead because he has denounced their marriage. The story is dense with politics, factions and Semitic proper names, and Flaubert had done heavy research. At a birthday feast a girl dances, Herod, drunk and delighted, promises her anything, and her mother has coached her. The head is brought. The story ends with three men carrying it away toward Galilee, taking turns because it is heavy.

How to read it

Read A Simple Heart first and by itself, and then, after a gap, read it again. It is forty pages and it does not work at speed; the whole effect depends on the accumulation of small facts delivered without emphasis.

Watch the narrator’s refusal to interpret. Flaubert never tells you what to think about the parrot, or about Félicité’s inner life, or about whether the final vision is a delusion. Readers divide sharply and both readings are supported, which is the point of the method.

Read Saint Julian for the style, which is completely different: bright, flat, cruel, with the violence rendered in the same register as the piety. And notice the last sentence, which pulls the narrator out of the story and attributes the whole thing to a church window.

Herodias rewards patience and notes. If your edition does not identify the factions and the names, a great deal of it will pass unread, and the payoff is a political thriller in which the famous scene is almost an afterthought.

Read it against Madame Bovary. The same technique, the same refusal to comment, applied to a woman with no illusions rather than to one made entirely of them. Emma is destroyed by what she imagined; Félicité imagines almost nothing and is not spared either.

Questions it raises

• Is the ending of A Simple Heart mockery, compassion, or a deliberate refusal to distinguish them?
• Flaubert wanted the author invisible. Does the absence of comment make a story more honest, or does it leave the reader to supply a judgement the author has declined to make?
• Félicité’s life contains almost nothing that the world would count. Does the story argue that it mattered, or only insist on attending to it?
• Julian is sainted after murdering his parents. Is that grace, or the logic of legend, and does Flaubert distinguish?
• Three periods, three styles. What does the arrangement claim about the relation between a way of writing and a way of living?
• Herodias ends with the weight of a severed head. What does it mean to close a book of saints and servants on a detail of logistics?