176
MARY McCARTHY
brother, Achille, was a doctor. He did a bad operation on their father;
gangrene developed, and Dr. Flaubert died. A little later, Flaubert's
sister Caroline died of puerperal fever; it is not clear whether this was
Achille again, but Flaubert in a letter described sitting up with Caroline's
body while her husband and a priest snored. Just like Emma's wake.
Flaubert remembered those snores. Did he remember the medical mur–
der of his father when he wrote about Charles's operation on the club–
footed inn boy-the most villainous folly in the book? A novelist is an
elephant, but an elephant who must pretend to forget.
On the one hand, Flaubert declared
he
was Emma. On the other,
he wrote to a lady: "There's nothing in
Madame Bovary
that's drawn
from life. It's a
completely invented
story. None of my own feelings or
experiences are in it." So help
him
God. Of course, he was fibbing, as is
clear from his more intimate correspondence. Like all novelists, he drew
on his own experiences, and, more than most novelists, he was frightened
by the need to invent. When he came to do the ball at Vaubyessard, he
lamented. "It's so long since I've been to a ball."
If
memory failed, he
documented himself, as he did for Emma's school reading, going back
over the children's stories he had read as a little boy and the picture
books he had colored.
If
he had not an experience the story required, he
sought it out. Before writing the chapter about the agricultural fair, he
went to one; he consulted his brother about club foot and, disappointed
by the ignorance of Achille's answers, procured textbooks. There is
hardly a page in the novel that he had not "lived," and he constantly
drew on his own feelings to render Emma's.
All novelists do this, but Flaubert went beyond the usual call of
duty. Madame Bovary was not Flaubert, certainly; yet he became Ma–
dame Bovary and all the accessories to her story, her lovers, her hus–
band, her little greyhound, the corset lace that hissed around her hips
like a slithery grass snake as she undressed in the hotel room in Rouen,
the blinds of the cab that hid her and Leon as they made love. In a
letter he made clear the state of mind in which he wrote. That day he
had been doing the scene of the horseback ride, when Rodolphe se–
duces Emma in the woods. "What a delicious thing writing is--not to
be you any more but to move through the whole universe you're talking
about. Take me today, for instance: I was man and woman, lover and
mistress; I went riding in a forest on a fall afternoon beneath the
yellow leaves, and I was the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words he
and she spoke, and the red sun beating on their half-closed eyelids, which
were already heavy with passion." It is hard to imagine another great
novelist-Stendhal, Tolstoy, Jane Austen, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Balzac-
