FLAUBERT'S LAST TESTAMENT
625
again and again in his last years. "I am obsessed by the dead (my
dead) ," he wrote to Laure de Maupassant. "Is this a sign of old age?
I think so." He was fifty-three. The year was 1873 and the necrology
of the last four years had been long; it was to become longer. His
mother, his dearest friends, his literary colleagues and comrades-in–
arms-their deaths accumulated and were augmented by the passing
of people whom he did not love as he loved his mother, or George
Sand, or Louis Bouilhet, or whom he did not respect as he did Jules
de Goncourt, or Gautier, or even Sainte-Beuve, but who nevertheless
embodied his past, such as Louise Colet, his former mistress, and
Maurice Schlesinger, the husband of the woman Flaubert had loved
with a virtually mystic passion since his adolescence and whom he
had enshrined as Mme. Arnoux.
He could make of his life an altar of the dead, as witness the
time, effort, and passion he gave to keep alive the memory of the
cherished Louis Bouilhet. But he could also make it an altar of the
living. Perhaps he would not have said with Henry James that life
is nothing unless it is sacrificial, but he acted as if he believed this to
be so when he offered up his independence for the happiness of his
niece Caroline.
Caroline Commanville was the only child of Flaubert's only
sister, who had died in 1846, and she had been reared by her grand–
mother and her uncle. To Caro, as she was called, Flaubert gave the
full of the devotion of which he was capable. His love, characteristic–
ally enough, expressed itself in his solicitude for the grace of her mind.
Something of his yearning tenderness for her, which appears so un–
abashedly in the letters which she published after his death, was lent
to Bouvard and Pecuchet when, moved in part by belated parental
impulses, they adopt the stray children to educate them for decorous
and useful lives. Flaubert spent thirteen years on Caro's education,
and the goal of his affectionate efforts was like that of Nature in
Wordsworth's poem:
This Child I to myself shall take;
She shall be mine, and
I
shall make
A
Lady
of
my
own
-a Lady who in her own person should be the answer to the vulgarity
and stupidity of the time.
