FLAUBERT'S LAST TESTAMENT
617
The evidence of their superiority gave umbrage. As they upheld
immoral points of view, they were surely immoral themselves; slanders
were invented about them.
Then a pitiable faculty developed in their spirit, that of perceiving
stupidity and no longer tolerating it.
Insignificant things made them sad: advertisements in the news–
papers, a smug profile, a foolish remark heard by chance.
Musing on what was said in the village, and on there existing as
far as the Antipodes [other people like the members of the village bour–
geoisie], they felt as though the heaviness of all the earth were weighing
on them.
It
is no wonder that more than one critic has considered whether
Bouvard and Pecuchet must not be taken as standing for Flaubert
himself, or for Flaubert and the good friend and neighbor of his
later years, Laporte, who found pleasure in helping accumulate the
material for
Bouvard and pecuchet.
II I
Bouvard and Pecuchet, then, are not the objects of Flau–
bert's satire. At most they are the butts of his humor, which is strongly
qualified by affection. They are never represented as doing anything
in
the least ignoble or mean. They are "justified" characters. We
therefore naturally suppose that the savageness which the book was
intended to express is to be found in the exposition of the studies
which the two friends undertake--this surely will constitute the fierce
indictment of the bourgeois democracy.
But again our supposition is disappointed. The horrors of the
culture of the bourgeois dempcracy play a considerably smaller part
than we anticipate. They are less horrible than we had expected.
And the animus with which they are exhibited turns out to be not
nearly so savage as we had been led to hope.
As I have said, a good many of the misadventures of Bouvard
and Pecuchet befall them simply because they are comic characters,
or because life is as it is.
If
their tenant farmer cheats them,
if
their
handyman diddles them, we cannot conclude that rural cupidity and
the unreliability of rural labor have been brought about by the as–
cendancy of the bourgeoisie.
If
Bouvard, in two wonderful scenes,
