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PARTISAN REVIEW
accompaniment of the joy art gives us. "The fame of Corneille"
indeed! But-to
be
Corneille! To feel
one's self
Corneille!
But then I have always seen you lump art together with a lot
of other things-patriotism, love, what you will-a lot of things
which to my mind are alien to it and far from adding to its stature
diminish it. This is one of the chasms that exist between you and me.
April 24, 1852
2
You speak of your discouragements : if you could see mine!
Sometimes I don't understand why my arms don't drop from my
body with fatigue, why my brains don't melt away. I am leading a
stern existence, stripped of all external pleasure, and am sustained
only by a kind of permanent rage, which sometimes makes me weep
tears of impotence but which never abates. I love my work with a
love that is frenzied and perverted, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt
that scratches his belly. Sometimes, when I am empty, when words
don't come, when I find I haven't written a single sentence after
scribbling whole pages, I collapse on my couch and lie there dazed,
bogged in a swamp of despair, hating myself and blaming myself for
this demented pride which makes me pant after a chimera. A quar–
ter of an hour later everything changes; my heart is pounding with
joy. Last Wednesday I had to get up and fetch my handkerchief;
tears were streaming down my face. I had been moved by my own
writing; the emotion I had conceived, the phrase that rendered it,
and the satisfaction of having found the phrase-all were causing
me to experience the most exquisite pleasure. At least I believe that
all those elements were present in this emotion, which after all was
predominantly a matter of nerves. There exist even higher emotions
of this same kind: those which are devoid of the sensory element.
These are superior, in moral beauty, to virtue-so independent are
they of any personal factor, of any human implication . Occasionally
(at great moments of illumination ) I have had glimpses, in the
2 After the first version of
La Tentation de Saint Antoine
was judged, by
his friends DuCamp and Bouilhet, unworthy of publication, Flaubert spent a
year and a half traveling with DuCamp in Egypt and the Near East. He re–
turned to France in 1851, and the liaison with Louise Colet was quickly re–
sumed. But once again Flaubert retired to Croisset, this time to write
Madame
Bouary.
Once again relations became acrimonious, and in 1854 the affair came
to its definitive end.
