FLAUBERT'S LAST TESTAMENT
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who had won his consdnt and campaigned for the pension. They felt
he was a drain on their resources and called him "the consumer";
their own way of life continued to be expensive. They required him
to enlist his friends in further help to them. When the devoted La–
porte, who himself had lost his fortune, refused to commit himself
further, they insisted that Flaubert break with him, which he did in
great sadness.
These events, interesting in themselves, are significant for our
purpose as constituting the circumstance in which Flaubert wrote the
Three Tales
and as having a bearing upon their common theme of
the sacrifice of the self; and the
Three Tales
must inevitably be read
as a gloss upon
Bouvard and pecuchet.
In September of 1875, with
the Commanville affairs temporarily under control, Flaubert went to
spend six weeks at Concarneau with his old friend, the naturalist
Georges Pouchet. Flaubert's nerves were in a bad state, he was deeply
distraught. He envied the calm with which his scientist friend went
about his work. Unable to take up his own work on
Bouvard and
Pecuchet,
he swam and walked to restore his equanimity and he be–
gan the story of
St. Julian.
He took it with him when he left Con–
carneau and finished it in January. In February he began
A Simple
Heart,
which he completed in August. In August he began
Herodias,
which he finished the following February. The stories appeared as a
newspaper serial and then in a volume; they were greeted with al–
most universal admiration- Flaubert's first popular success since
Madame Bovary.
The part that these three stories play in Flaubert's artistic de–
velopment cannot concern us here. Nor can we stop to consider all
that they might be understood to say of Flaubert's inner life. What
is of immediate consequence to us is the theme which they have in
common and how that bears upon
Bouvard and p ecuchet.
The stories are well known and need be recalled but briefly.
All are associated with Flaubert's native Rouen. The legend of St.
Julian is the subject of a window of the Cathedral; the Herodias
story is told on the tympanum of the Cathedral's south portal. The
Felicite of
A Simple Heart
was a servant-girl whom Flaubert had
known in his boyhood. The story of St. Julian, a Christianized version
of the Oedipus legend, tells of a young nobleman brought up to arms
and the chase; his passion for killing is exorbitant (the catalogue of
