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PARTISAN REVIEW
the beasts he slays reminds us of nothing so much as the 1,500
volumes Flaubert read for
Bouvard and Pecuchet)
until one day it
is prophesied to him by a gigantic and invulnerable stag that he
will
kill his own mother and father. The prophecy comes true despite
Julian's best efforts to circumvent it. Julian, shunned by all mankind,
lives as a hermit. One cold night there comes to
his
hut a leper of
extreme loathesomeness who asks for food, then for the warmth of
Julian's embrace, then for a kiss upon his ghastly mouth. And as
Julian's
caritas
extends to this last request, the leper appears as Christ
and carries Julian off in glory.
A Simple Heart
is a record of a life
of religious piety and of entire devotion to others. Virtually the only
events of Felicite's life are the deaths of those whom she loves and
serves. (It has been remarked that Felicite has a seizure on the road
very much like that which Flaubert suffered as the first episode of
his
illness; other possible connections 'with Flaubert are her cherishing
of her nephew, her being exploited by her relatives, her being left
destitute by the death of her mistress and her continuing to live by
sufferance in the stripped and empty house.)
H erodias
is the story
of John the Baptist imprisoned by the Tetrarch Antipas, of Salome's
dance, and the severed head.
The religious elements of the three stories must not mislead us
about the condition of Flaubert's belief. The
Tales
are not to be
thought of as tentatives toward an avowal of faith. For this Flaubert's
attitude toward religion was far too complex. Even in
Bouvard and
Pecuchet,
as I have noted, Flaubert treats simple, primary religious
faith, or impulse to faith, with great gentleness; what dismayed
him
were the intellectual extrapolations from this simplicity. Yet
his
re–
sponse to religion is not comprised by the tenderness he could show
to simple faith and his contempt for systematic theology. What
his
attitude to religion actually was in its considerable complexity has
been well described by Philip Spencer in his
Flaubert:
"He seems ...
to have regarded Christianity as a spent force.... The only two ele–
ments in Catholicism to which Flaubert responded were subordinate
to the main tradition and divergent from it: the hatred of life, the
negation of life's goodness, which he thought he discovered in Catholic
philosophy, and, concomitant with it, the rigorous self-abasement of
asceticism. But
his
own religious feeling, if such it can be called, was
diffuse-a kind of creatureliness before the mystery of creation. 'What
