50
LEO BERSANI
lyzable "symptoms" and at the same time a demonstration of the
fact that to interpret symptoms is simply (and extraordinarily) to
multiply fictions.
The most curious and extreme example in Flaubert of this
psychoanalytic fiction
avant la lettre
is
La L egende de Saint Julien
r
H ospitalier,
where Flaubert traces the biography of a sadist whose
saintly self-immolation is the punishment he inflicts upon himself
for his murderous fantasies. Raised by parents who think of him as
"marked by God" and who "gave him infinite respect and attention,"
Julien displays both a mildness which makes his mother think he
will become an archbishop, and a breathless interest in warriors' tales
of "the prodigious wounds" inflicted in the battles of their youth
which leads his father to see in him a future conqueror. But one day
in church this spoiled and deceptively submissive boy sees a white
mouse whose reappearance on subsequent Sundays fascinates, troubles
and "importunes" him. "Taken with hatred" for the mouse, he
"resolved to get rid of it," and, having killed it with a stick, he
begins his career of fantastic slaughter. He becomes a hunter in
order to satisfy his thirst for blood, and with a supernatural power
which objectifies the insatiable nature of his urge to destroy, he kills
with exhilaration an incredible number of animals until one day a
great stag, before dying from an arrow Julien has shot into his head,
curses him and predicts he will murder his mother and father.
Horrified, Julien gives up hunting, leaves home, becomes a
famous warrior and marries an emperor's daughter who, when he
tells her of his fears, ridicules his superstitions and encourages him
to take up hunting again. When he does, the animals he shoots at
mysteriously resist his attacks, surround and follow him ominously
(with their "cunning looks, ... they seemed to be meditating a plan
of revenge.") Terrified and exasperated, Julien pounces on some red
partridges who inexplicably disappear under the cape he hopes to
smother them with. "His thirst for slaughter came back; since there
was a lack of animals, he would have liked to massacre men." The
occasion at once presents itself. His parents, who, after years of search–
ing for their son, have arrived at his castle, are put up for the night
by Julien's wife in the younger couple's bedroom. There Julien,
mistaking them for his wife and a lover, savagely kills them. He then
leaves his wife and his land, asking her only "to pray for his soul, since
